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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 76079 ***





A CHILD’S GUIDE TO READING




[Illustration: _Engraved by T. Westneth._

MILTON]




  A CHILD’S GUIDE TO
  READING


  BY
  JOHN MACY


  The greatest pleasure in life is that of reading
  while we are young.--WILLIAM HAZLITT.

  Though in all great and combined facts there
  is much which childhood cannot thoroughly imagine,
  there is also in very many a great deal
  which can only be truly apprehended for the
  first time at that age.--WALTER BAGEHOT.


  NEW YORK
  THE BAKER & TAYLOR COMPANY
  1909




  COPYRIGHT, 1909, BY
  THE BAKER & TAYLOR COMPANY

  Published, November, 1909


  THE TROW PRESS, NEW YORK




PREFACE


This is a Child’s Guide to Literature and not a Guide to Juvenile
Books. The larger part of the books discussed in the various chapters
and included in the supplementary lists were written for adult readers,
and nearly all of them are at least as interesting to the reader of
forty as to the reader of fourteen. The great writers are the goal and
the child is the traveler. That is why in a Child’s Guide appear the
names of Browning, Carlyle, Tolstoi, Meredith, Gibbon, Darwin, Plato,
Æschylus. A normal child will not be reading those masters, certainly
not all of them, but he will be reading toward them; and between the
greatest names will be found lesser writers who make easy upward slopes
for young feet that are climbing to the highest. In the supplementary
lists will be found very little of what is admittedly ephemeral, and
still less of that kind of “Juvenile” which has not sufficient literary
quality to outlast the most childish interests and tastes. On the other
hand, if we have any feeling for the abundant human nature of children,
we cannot invite them to fly, nor pretend that we have ourselves flown,
to the severe heights of Frederic Harrison’s position when he advises
that we read only authors of the first rank in every subject and every
nation. That ideal, which, to be sure, in his excellent essay on the
“Choice of Books” is tempered by his humanity and good sense, is at too
chilly an altitude for a Child’s Guide, or, I should think, for any
other guide written with appreciation of what kind of advice ordinary
humanity can or will benefit by.

In the advice offered by some very wise men to young and old readers
there is much that is amusingly paradoxical. Schopenhauer, like
Frederic Harrison, enjoins us to devote our reading time exclusively to
the works of those great minds of all times and countries which overtop
the rest of humanity. Yet Schopenhauer is giving that advice in a book
which he certainly hopes will find readers and which, however great we
may consider him, his modesty would not allow him to rank among the
works of the greatest minds of all ages. Emerson counsels us to read no
book that is not at least a year old. But he is himself writing a book
of which he and his publishers undoubtedly hope to sell a few copies
before a year has passed. Thoreau tells us that our little village is
not doing very much for culture, and then he frightens us away from our
poets by one of those “big” ideas with which he and the other preachers
of his generation liked to make us children ashamed of ourselves.
“The works of the great poets,” he says, “have never yet been read by
mankind, for only great poets can read them.” Well, Thoreau, whatever
else he was, was not a great poet, and yet he seems to have read the
great ones and to have understood them while he was still a young
man. It is nearer the truth to say that anybody can read the great
poets. That is the lesson, if there is one, which this Guide seeks to
inculcate.

There should be a chapter in this book about the Bible and religious
writings. But practical considerations debarred it. The American
parent, though quite willing to intrust to others many matters relating
to the welfare of his children, usually prefers to give his own
counsels as to the spirit in which the Bible should be read and what
other religious works should be read with it.




CONTENTS


  CHAPTER                                             PAGE

     I.--OF GUIDES AND RULES FOR READING                17

    II.--THE PURPOSE OF READING                         27

   III.--THE READING OF FICTION                         40

    IV.--THE READING OF FICTION (_continued_)           60

         List of Fiction                                71

     V.--THE READING OF POETRY                          96

    VI.--THE READING OF POETRY (_continued_)           109

         List of Books of Poetry                       123

   VII.--THE READING OF HISTORY                        143

         List of Works of History                      153

  VIII.--THE READING OF BIOGRAPHY                      164

         List of Biographies                           172

    IX.--THE READING OF ESSAYS                         179

         List of Essays                                192

     X.--THE READING OF FOREIGN CLASSICS               204

    XI.--THE PRESS OF TO-DAY                           217

   XII.--THE STUDY OF LITERATURE                       235

         List of Works on Literature                   257

  XIII.--SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY                        260

         List of Works in Science and Philosophy       267




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


                                 FACING
                                  PAGE

  Milton                 _Frontispiece_

  Dickens                            30

  Thackeray                          46

  Scott                              56

  Hawthorne                          68

  Cooper                             76

  Eliot                              84

  Shelley                           104

  Tennyson                          120

  Longfellow                        134

  Wordsworth                        142

  Emerson                           196




A CHILD’S GUIDE TO READING




CHAPTER I

OF GUIDES AND RULES FOR READING


If you ever go into the Maine woods to hunt and fish you will have as
your companion a veteran of forest and stream, a professional guide.
It will be his duty to show you where the game and fish are most
plentiful; to see that you do not get into trouble with the authorities
by breaking the game laws; to make your camp comfortable; and if you
are very green, to keep a watchful eye on you lest you accidentally
shoot him or mistake another sportsman for a deer. If you are the right
sort--the Maine guide is almost certain to be the right sort--you will
get a great deal more from your companion than the simple services
for which you pay him. He will be not only guide, but friend and
philosopher, and will grudge you nothing of his stores of wisdom,
kindliness, and humor.

If, however, you are to receive most profit and pleasure from life in
the woods with this good comrade, you must do your part of the work,
use what wits you have, and not show a disposition to lean too limply
on his strength. There are some things that the best guide cannot do.
Not only will he be unable to think for you, but if you are too ready
to let him do all the paddling, he will give you only perfunctory help
and sulky advice. If, on the contrary, you are handy, he will be doubly
handy. The more you learn, the more he can tell you. The more rapidly
you approach the time when you are qualified to set up as professional
guide yourself, the more you will enjoy the niceties of his theories of
hunting, fishing, and wood lore.

Now, a guide to reading--if he be of the right sort--can do for the
beginner in literature very much the same degree of service as the
Maine woodsman. The literary guide is merely one who has lived longer
among books than the unprofessional reader. Since he has elected to
pass his life in the literary woods, he may be supposed to have a good
nose for interesting clews, and sharp eyes and alert ears for leading
signs. He knows what novels are good fishing and what poetic trees are
sound and what are hollow. But his services, however willingly tendered
and skillfully performed, have limitations. You must do your own
thinking and your own reading, and understand that only when you cease
to be in floundering need of a guide will you begin to receive the
richest benefits of reading. The guide’s idea of his duty is to help
you to get along altogether without him.

No guide, no literary adviser can give you ears for poetry or eyes for
truth. The wisest companion can only persuade you to live among good
books in order that your ear may have opportunity to reveal its fine
capacities if it has them, and in order that your eye, dwelling upon
beautiful things, may grow practiced in discernment. He cannot read for
you. If you do not intend or hope to read any of the books mentioned in
this volume, it will be waste of time for you to turn this page. If you
passively receive every judgment of your guide about the merits of the
scores of books we shall discuss, and never once question or try his
judgment for yourself, you may be learning something about this guide,
but you will not be learning about literature. It is not the part of a
good pupil to surrender right of private judgment, but it is his part
to give his judgment solid matter to work upon. On the other hand, too
much independence, especially if it is not grounded in experience, is
not modest. Even those who have read a good deal and arrived at mature
opinions about books, may be content to accompany for a while a new
guide whose experience has, necessarily, been different from that of
others.

Whatever your hope or intention, your guide is only a guide; he has
not power to lead you against your will, he has not the schoolmaster’s
right to prescribe a set course of reading. The reading must be
voluntary, and to have value it must involve some hard work. Healthful
entertainment and recreation we can safely promise. As for wisdom,
reverence, the deeper delights of communion with noble minds, whether
you meet these great spiritual experiences depends on you. The guide
can merely indicate where they may be sought.

Let us at the outset agree not to map out our journey too rigidly. A
young friend of mine conceived at the age of sixteen the inordinate
ambition to read everything that is good. He procured a public library
catalogue, and asked a school-teacher to check off the titles of all
the books knowledge of which is essential to a perfect education. The
teacher smiled and confessed that she did not know even the titles
herself. She might have added that neither does any one else know the
titles, much less the insides, of all good books. But she marked some
hundred names, and the ambitious youngster entered upon his long feast.
He never finished all the books that were checked, for one or two
proved discouragingly stiff and dull, and as he ran his eye down the
list for the next prescribed masterpiece he saw other alluring titles
which were not checked, and he wrote the numbers on library slips. The
experience taught him that he must select books for himself, and that
the world’s library is too vast for anyone to be acquainted with all
its treasures.

A youth so eager to know good books can be trusted sooner or later to
find his way to them. For the benefit of less zealous persons, great
faith used to be placed in lists of the Hundred Best Books. Such
lists, even the very judicious selection made by Sir John Lubbock
(Lord Avebury), can never be satisfactory. Lord Avebury is too good a
student of nature and human nature to regard his list as final. It was
not final for one man, John Ruskin, who has given us a most inspiring
essay on books, “Of Kings’ Treasures.” Ruskin thought that Lubbock had
included in the chosen hundred some books that were not only unworthy
but injurious. No man could make a list which would fare any better at
the hands of another critic of solid convictions. Who shall select a
social Four Hundred, all of whom we should accept as friends? Who can
select a Four Hundred or a One Hundred of books and not leave out some
of the noblest and best? It may be that Lubbock and Ruskin were both a
little priggish to take that century of masterpieces quite so solemnly.

In books, as in all things, we cherish much that is not the best, but
is good in its way. It is not natural nor right to reject all but the
superlatively excellent. It is natural to prefer sometimes a book of
secondary value, and it is perversely natural to turn away from the
book that we are assured too insistently we “ought to read.” A formal
list of “oughts” is a severe test for ordinary human patience. Becky
Sharp in “Vanity Fair” is a bad-tempered and bad-hearted young woman,
but one can have a little sympathy with her when she throws her copy of
Johnson’s Dictionary at the head of her teacher as she parts forever
from the school gates. It is not altogether her fault if Johnson’s
Dictionary seems to her at that moment of all printed things the most
detestable.

Yet perhaps no better book than a good dictionary could be found
whereon to base a library and a knowledge of literature. The wit who
said that the dictionary is a good book, but changes the subject too
often, told but a partial truth, for the dictionary keeps consistently
to the first of all subjects, the language in which all subjects
are expressed. If it be true that Americans are of all peoples the
most assiduous patrons of the dictionary, the future of our popular
education and of our national literature is secure, for although mere
words will not make thought, it is only thoughtful people who have a
zealous interest in the dictionary. The schoolmaster who first made
the present writer conscious that there is a difference between good
English and bad used to tell us in the moments when regular school
exercises were pending to study our dictionaries. The dictionary would
be a reasonable answer to that delightful conundrum: “If you were
wrecked on a desert island, and could have only one book, what book
would you choose?”

The shrewdest of all answers to that question evaded it: “I should
spend so much time trying to choose the book that I should miss the
steamer and not be wrecked.” These conundrums--the best book?--the
best hundred books?--the greatest novel?--the greatest poem?--are not
to be answered. The use of them is that they stir our imaginations
and whet our judgments. If we come close and try to settle them in
earnest, we bring tumbling about our heads a multitude of conflicting
answers. Then we flee from the disorder and realize that conundrums are
only stimulating nonsense. Individual choice among the riches of the
world’s literature is not to be confined by hard and fast rules and
tests.

As a practical matter we are not altogether free to choose. Our
book friends, like our human friends, are in part chosen for us by
accidental encounters. We do not wander over the world seeking for
the dozen souls that are most fit to be grappled to us with hoops of
steel. We merely choose the most congenial among our neighbors. So it
is with books. Each of us wishes to select the best among such as are
available, to have judgment in accepting the right one when it falls
in our way. Biography is full of instances of chance encounters in the
world’s library that have shaped great careers.

John Stuart Mill records in his Autobiography how Wordsworth’s
poetry brought about in him a spiritual regeneration. At the age of
twenty-one, precociously far advanced in his study of economics and
philosophy, he found himself dejected and with no clear outlook upon
life. He had often heard of the uplifting power of poetry, and read
the whole of Byron, but Byron did him no good. He took up Wordsworth’s
poems “from curiosity, with no expectation of mental relief.” “I found
myself,” he says, “at once better and happier as I came under their
influence.” The reading of Wordsworth was the immediate occasion,
though not the sole cause, of a complete change in his way of thinking,
and his new way of thinking led him to life-long associations with
other great men.

We cannot tell which poet, which thinker, will do for us what
Wordsworth did for Mill. But while we are young we can take trial
excursions into literature until we find our own. And when we do find
our own, the treasure that is most precious to our souls, we shall know
it, and know it the better, perhaps, if we have tried many good books
and failed to like them.

If we are to rely so frankly upon our own likings, a word of caution
may be necessary to help us distinguish liberty of choice from
unreasonable license. We have to ask not only, Does this book interest
me?--but, Does this book appeal to the best tastes and emotions in me?
Many of us, by no means bad human beings, are so constituted that if
our eye meets the morbid, the coarse, the senselessly horrible, we are
fascinated, we are indeed interested. But it requires only the most
simple self-analysis and a little honesty, to pull ourselves together
and realize that it is an unworthy side of us, a side that we do not
care to show our friends, which is being held at attention. Not that
we need, like the stupidest of the old Puritans, be afraid of a book
simply because it does thrill us and make us breathless. For every bad
book which holds the depraved mind guiltily alert, a good book can be
found, so absorbing, so compelling, that beside it the bad book is tame.

I once had a pupil whose transparent honesty was only one of his many
lovable qualities. He believed that “Literature” consisted of dull
books written by authors who died long ago. The ill-reasoned conclusion
was his own, but I found that the raw materials of his error lay
in the prudishness of one of his teachers. When I told him that
“Huckleberry Finn,” by a very live author, is literature, and that a
short story by Mrs. Mary Wilkins-Freeman in a current magazine seemed
to me literature of rare excellence, his delight so aroused his wits
that for some time after that my part of the lessons consisted merely
in meeting his enthusiasm halfway.

A friend once asked me what he could read to improve his mind. In the
pride of a little superior wisdom, I loftily recommended Shakespeare.
His reply was, “That is too deep for me.” A wiser counselor than
I, knowing his circumstances, would not have tried to cultivate a
sprouting ambition with quite so perfect an intellectual instrument.
But I stuck to my advice, and shortly after I had opportunity to prove
that I was, if not wise, at least on the side of wisdom. We went
together to see “Othello”--from gallery seats. After that my friend
read the play and another that was bound with it.

Shakespeare is deep, forsooth. Hamlet’s soliloquy in the fourth act:

    How all occasions do inform against me,

is so profound that it is darkened by its very depth. But the play
“Hamlet” is a stirring melodrama that keeps the “gallery gods” leaning
forward in their seats. The larger part of literature is by dead
authors, because the “great majority” of the race is dead and includes
its proportionate number of poets and prophets. Some great books _are_
dull except to a comparatively few minds in certain moods. But most
dull books by old writers have been forgotten; our ancestors saved
us the trouble of rejecting them. Most books that have survived are
triumphantly alive in all senses. The vitality of a book that is just
born may be brief as a candle flame. The old book that is still bright
has proved that its brightness is the true luster of the metal; else we
should not know its name.




CHAPTER II

THE PURPOSE OF READING


The question why we read books is one of those vast questions that need
no answer. As well ask, Why ought we to be good? or, Why do we believe
in a God? The whole universe of wisdom answers. To attempt an answer
in a chapter of a book would be like turning a spyglass for a moment
toward the stars. We take the great simple things for granted, like
the air we breathe. In a country that holds popular education to be
the foundation of all its liberties and fortunes, we do not find many
people who need to be argued into the belief that the reading of books
is good for us; even people who do not read much acknowledge vaguely
that they ought to read more.

There are, to be sure, men of rough worldly wisdom, even endowed with
spiritual insight, who distrust “book learning” and fall back on the
obvious truth that experience of life is the great teacher. Such
persons are in a measure justified in their conviction by the number of
unwise human beings who have read much but to no purpose.

    The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read,
    With loads of learned lumber in his head

is a living argument against mere reading. But we can meet such
argument by pointing out that the blockhead who cannot learn from books
cannot learn much from life, either. That sometimes useful citizen
whom it is fashionable to call a Philistine, and who calls himself a
“practical man,” often has under him a beginner fresh from the schools,
who is glib and confident in repeating bookish theories, but is not
yet skillful in applying them. If the practical man is thoughtless,
he sniffs at theory and points to his clumsy assistant as proof of
the uselessness of what is to be got from books. If he is wise, the
practical man realizes how much better off he would be, how much
farther his hard work and experience might have carried him, if he had
had the advantage of bookish training.

Moreover, the hard-headed skeptic, self-made and self-secure, who will
not traffic with the literature that touches his life work, is seldom
so confined to his own little shop that he will not, for recreation,
take holiday tours into the literature of other men’s lives and labors.
The man who does not like to read any books is, I am confident, seldom
found, and at the risk of slandering a patriot, I will express the
doubt whether he is a good citizen.

Honest he may be, but certainly not wise. The human race for thousands
of years has been writing its experiences, telling how it has met our
everlasting problems, how it has struggled with darkness and rejoiced
in light. What fools we should be to try to live our lives without the
guidance and inspiration of the generations that have gone before,
without the joy, encouragement, and sympathy that the best imaginations
of our generation are distilling into words. For literature is simply
life selected and condensed into books. In a few hours we can follow
all that is recorded of the life of Jesus--the best that He did in
years of teaching and suffering all ours for a day of reading, and the
more deeply ours for a lifetime of reading and meditation!

If the expression of life in words is strong and beautiful and true it
outlives empires, like the oldest books of the Old Testament. If it is
weak or trivial or untrue, it is forgotten like most of the “stories”
in yesterday’s newspaper, like most of the novels of last year. The
expression of truth, the transmission of knowledge and emotions between
man and man from generation to generation, this is the purpose of
literature. Not to read books is like being shut up in a dungeon while
life rushes by outside.

I happen to be writing in Christmas week, and I have read for the tenth
time “A Christmas Carol,” by Dickens, that amazing allegory in which
the hard, bitter facts of life are involved in a beautiful myth, that
wizard’s caldron in which humor bubbles and from which rise phantom
figures of religion and poetry. Can anyone doubt that if this story
were read by every man, woman, and child in the world, Christmas
would be a happier time and the feelings of the race elevated and
strengthened? The story has power enough to defeat armies, to make
revolutions in the faith of men, and turn the cold markets of the
world into festival scenes of charity. If you know any mean person,
you may be sure that he has not read “A Christmas Carol,” or that he
read it long ago and has forgotten it. I know there are persons who
pretend that the sentimentality of Dickens destroys their interest in
him. I once took a course with an overrefined, imperfectly educated
professor of literature, who advised me that in time I should outgrow
my liking for Dickens. It was only his way of recommending to me a kind
of fiction that I had not learned to like. In time I did learn to like
it, but I did not outgrow Dickens. A person who can read “A Christmas
Carol” aloud to the end and keep his voice steady is, I suspect, not a
safe person to trust with one’s purse or one’s honor.

It is not necessary to argue about the value of literature or even
to define it. One way of bringing ourselves to realize vividly what
literature can do for us is to enter the libraries of great men and see
what books have done for the acknowledged leaders of our race.

You will recall John Stuart Mill’s experience in reading Wordsworth.
Mill was a man of letters as well as a scientific economist and
philosopher, and we expect to find that men of letters have been
nourished on literature; reading must necessarily have been a large
part of their professional preparation. The examples of men of action
who have been molded and inspired by books will perhaps be more
helpful to remember; for most of us are not to be writers or to engage
in purely intellectual work; our ambitions point to a thousand
different careers in the world of action.

[Illustration: DICKENS]

Lincoln was not primarily a man of letters, although he wrote noble
prose on occasion, and the art of expression was important, perhaps
indispensable, in his political success. He read deeply in the law and
in books on public questions. For general literature he had little
time, either during his early struggles or after his public life began,
and his autobiographical memorandum contains the significant words:
“Education defective.” But these more significant words are found in a
letter which he wrote to Hackett, the player: “Some of Shakespeare’s
plays I have never read, while others I have gone over perhaps as
frequently as any unprofessional reader. Among the latter are ‘Lear,’
‘Richard III,’ ‘Henry VIII,’ ‘Hamlet,’ and, especially, ‘Macbeth.’”

If he had not read these masterpieces, no doubt he would have become
President just the same and guided the country through its terrible
difficulties; but we may be fairly sure that the high philosophy by
which he lifted the political differences of his day above partisan
quarrels, the command of words which gives his letters and speeches
literary permanence apart from their biographical interest, the
poetic exaltation of the Gettysburg Address, these higher qualities
of genius, beyond the endowment of any native wit, came to Lincoln in
some part from the reading of books. It is important to note that he
followed Franklin’s advice to read much but not too many books; the
list of books mentioned in the biographical records of Lincoln is not
long. But he went over those half dozen plays “frequently.” We should
remember, too, that he based his ideals upon the Bible and his style
upon the King James Version. His writings abound in biblical phrases.

We are accustomed to regard Lincoln as a thinker. His right arm in
the saddest duty of his life, General Grant, was a man of deeds; as
Lincoln said of him, he was a “copious worker and fighter, but a very
meager writer and telegrapher.” In his “Memoirs,” Grant makes a modest
confession about his reading:

“There is a fine library connected with the Academy [West Point] from
which cadets can get books to read in their quarters. I devoted more
time to these than to books relating to the course of studies. Much
of the time, I am sorry to say, was devoted to novels, but not those
of a trashy sort. I read all of Bulwer’s then published, Cooper’s,
Marryat’s, Scott’s, Washington Irving’s works, Lever’s, and many others
that I do not now remember.”

Grant was not a shining light in his school days, nor indeed in his
life until the Civil War, and at first sight he is not a striking
example of a great man influenced by books. Yet who can deny that the
fruit of that early reading is to be found in his “Memoirs,” in which
a man of action unused to writing and called upon to narrate great
events, discovers an easy adequate style? There is a dangerous kind of
conjecture in which many biographers indulge when they try to relate
logically the scattered events of a man’s life. A conjectured relation
is set down as a proved or unquestioned relation. I shall say something
about this in the chapter on biography, and I do not wish to violate my
own teachings. But we may, without harm, hazard the suggestion, which
is only a suggestion, that some of the chivalry of Scott’s heroes wove
itself into Grant’s instincts and inspired this businesslike, modern
general, in the days when politeness has lost some of its flourish, to
be the great gentleman he was at Appomattox when he quietly wrote into
the terms of the surrender that the Confederate officers should keep
their side arms. Stevenson’s account of the episode in his essay on
“Gentlemen” is heightened, though not above the dignity of the facts,
certainly not to a degree that is untrue to the facts as they are to
be read in Grant’s simple narrative. Since I have agreed not to say
“ought to read,” I will only express the hope that the quotation from
Stevenson will lead you to the essay and to the volume that contains it.

“On the day of the capitulation, Lee wore his presentation sword; it
was the first thing that Grant observed, and from that moment he had
but one thought: how to avoid taking it. A man, who should perhaps have
had the nature of an angel, but assuredly not the special virtues of
a gentleman, might have received the sword, and no more words about
it: he would have done well in a plain way. One who wished to be a
gentleman, and knew not how, might have received and returned it: he
would have done infamously ill, he would have proved himself a cad;
taking the stage for himself, leaving to his adversary confusion of
countenance and the ungraceful posture of a man condemned to offer
thanks. Grant, without a word said, added to the terms this article:
‘All officers to retain their side arms’; and the problem was solved
and Lee kept his sword, and Grant went down to posterity, not perhaps a
fine gentleman, but a great one.”

Napoleon, who of all men of mighty deeds after Julius Cæsar had the
greatest intellect, was a tireless reader, and since he needed only
four or five hours’ sleep in twenty-four he found time to read in
the midst of his prodigious activities. Nowadays those of us who are
preparing to conquer the world are taught to strengthen ourselves for
the task by getting plenty of sleep. Napoleon’s devouring eyes read far
into the night; when he was in the field his secretaries forwarded a
stream of books to his headquarters; and if he was left without a new
volume to begin, some underling had to bear his imperial displeasure.
No wonder that his brain contained so many ideas that, as the
sharp-tongued poet, Heine, said, one of his lesser thoughts would keep
all the scholars and professors in Germany busy all their lives making
commentaries on it.

In Franklin’s “Autobiography” we have an unusually clear statement of
the debt of a man of affairs to literature: “From a child I was fond
of reading, and all the little money that came into my hands was ever
laid out in books. Pleased with the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress,’ my first
collection was of John Bunyan’s works in separate little volumes....
My father’s little library consisted chiefly of books in polemic
divinity, most of which I read, and have since often regretted that, at
a time when I had such a thirst for knowledge, more proper books had
not fallen in my way, since it was now resolved that I should not be
a clergyman. ‘Plutarch’s Lives’ there was in which I read abundantly,
and I still think that time spent to great advantage. There was also
a book of De Foe’s, called an ‘Essay on Projects,’ and another of Dr.
Mather’s, called ‘Essays to do Good,’ which perhaps gave me a turn of
thinking that had an influence on some of the principal future events
of my life.”

It is not surprising to find that the most versatile of versatile
Americans read De Foe’s “Essay on Projects,” which contains practical
suggestions on a score of subjects, from banking and insurance to
national academies. In Cotton Mather’s “Essays to do Good” is the germ
perhaps of the sensible morality of Franklin’s “Poor Richard.” The
story of how Franklin gave his nights to the study of Addison and by
imitating the _Spectator_ papers taught himself to write, is the best
of lessons in self-cultivation in English. The “Autobiography” is proof
of how well he learned, not Addison’s style, which was suited to Joseph
Addison and not to Benjamin Franklin, but a clear, firm manner of
writing. In Franklin’s case we can see not only what he owed to books,
but how one side of his fine, responsive mind was starved because, as
he put it, more proper books did not fall in his way. The blind side of
Franklin’s great intellect was his lack of religious imagination. This
defect may be accounted for by the forbidding nature of the religious
books in his father’s library. Repelled by the dull discourses, the
young man missed the religious exaltation and poetic mysticism which
the New England divines concealed in their polemic argument. Franklin’s
liking for Bunyan and his confession that his father’s discouragement
kept him from being a poet, “most probably,” he says, “a very bad
one,” show that he would have responded to the right kind of religious
literature, and not have remained all his life such a complacent
rationalist.

If it is clear that the purpose of reading is to put ourselves in
communication with the best minds of our race, we need go no farther
for a definition of “good reading.” Whatever human beings have
said well in words is literature, whether it be the Declaration of
Independence or a love story. Reading consists in nothing more than in
taking one of the volumes in which somebody has said something well,
opening it on one’s knee, and beginning.

We take it for granted, then, that we know why we read. We shall
presently discuss some books which we shall like to read. But before
we come to an examination of certain kinds of literature and certain
of its great qualities, we may ask one further question: How shall we
read? One answer is that we should read with as much of ourselves as a
book warrants, with the part of ourselves that a book demands. Mrs.
Browning says:

              We get no good
    By being ungenerous, even to a book,
    And calculating profits--so much help
    By so much reading. It is rather when
    We gloriously forget ourselves, and plunge
    Soul-forward, headlong, into a book’s profound,
    Impassioned for its beauty, and salt of truth--
    ’Tis then we get the right good from a book.

We sometimes know exactly what we wish to get from a book, especially
if it is a volume of information on a definite subject. But the great
book is full of treasures that one does not deliberately seek, and
which indeed one may miss altogether on the first journey through. It
is almost nonsensical to say: Read Macaulay for clearness, Carlyle
for power, Thackeray for ease. Literary excellence is not separated
and bottled up in any such drug-shop array. If Macaulay is a master
of clearness it is because he is much else besides. Unless we read
a man for all there is in him, we get very little, we meet, not a
living human being, not a vital book, but something dead, dismembered,
disorganized. We do not read Thackeray for ease; we read him for
Thackeray and enjoy his ease by the way.

We must read a book for all there is in it or we shall get little or
nothing. To be masters of books we must have learned to let books
master us. This is true of books that we are required to read, such
as text books, and of those we read voluntarily and at leisure. The
law of reading is to give a book its due and a little more. The art
of reading is to know how to apply this law. For there is an art of
reading, for each of us to learn for himself, a private way of making
the acquaintance of books.

Macaulay, whose mind was never hurried nor confused, learned to
read very rapidly, to absorb a page at a glance. A distinguished
professor, who has spent his life in the most minutely technical
scholarship, surprised us one day by commending to his classes the fine
art of “skipping.” Many good books, including some most meritorious
“three-decker” novels, have their profitless pages, and it is useful
to know by a kind of practiced instinct where to pause and reread
and where to run lightly and rapidly over the page. It is a useful
accomplishment not only in the reading of fiction, but in the business
of life, to the man of affairs who must get the gist of a mass of
written matter, and to the student of any special subject.

Usually, of course, a book that is worth reading at all is worth
reading carefully. Thoroughness of reading is the first thing to preach
and to practice, and it is perhaps dangerous to suggest to a beginner
that any book should be skimmed. The suggestion will serve its purpose
if it indicates that there are ways to read, that practice in reading
is like practice in anything else; the more one does, and the more
intelligently one does it, the farther and more easily one can go. In
the best reading--that is, the most thoughtful reading of the most
thoughtful books, attention is necessary. It is even necessary that
we should read some works, some passages, so often and with such close
application that we commit them to memory. It is said that the habit of
learning pieces by heart is not so prevalent as it used to be. I hope
that this is not so. What! have you no poems by heart, no great songs,
no verses from the Bible, no speeches from Shakespeare? Then you have
not begun to read, you have not learned how to read.

We have said enough, perhaps, of the theories of reading. The
one lesson that seems most obvious is that we must come close
to literature. Therefore we shall pause no longer on general
considerations, but enter at once the library where the living books
are ranged upon the shelves.




CHAPTER III

THE READING OF FICTION


Our reason for considering prose fiction before the other departments
of literature is not that fiction is of greatest importance, but that
it is the branch of literature most widely known and enjoyed. Pretend
as we may to prefer poetry and “solid books” (as if good fiction lacked
solidity!) most of us have read more novels than histories, more short
stories than poems. The good old Quaker who wrote a dull history of
Nantucket could not understand why the young people preferred novels to
his veracious chronicle; which was the same as saying that he did not
understand young people, or old people, either. Since the beginning of
recorded human history the world has gathered eagerly about the knees
of its story-tellers, and to the end of the race it will continue to
applaud and honor the skillful inventor of fiction.

There was a time when preachers and teachers, at least those of the
English-speaking nations, had a somber view of life and looked with
distrust on pleasant arts; and no doubt they were right in holding
that if stories take our thoughts off the great realities, we cannot
afford to abandon our minds to such toys and trivial inventions. But
the severe moralists never made out a good case against the arts;
they could not prove that joy and laughter and light entertainment
interfered with high thinking and right living; and in time they
rediscovered, what other wise men had never forgotten, that art is good
for the soul. In the past century the novel has taken all knowledge
for its province and has allied itself to the labors of prophets,
preachers, and educators. The philosopher finds that some of the great
speculative minds have uttered their thoughts in the form of artistic
fiction. The true scholar no longer confines himself to annotating
the fictions of the Greeks and Romans and the established classics
of his race. He sees in the best art of his contemporaries the same
effort of the human soul to express itself which informed the ancient
masterpieces.

Jane Austen, whose delicate novels inspired stronger writers than she,
who by her gentleness and truth influenced creative powers greater
than her own, whimsically recognized and perhaps helped to remove
the pedantic prejudice against fiction. The following passage from
“Northanger Abbey” will give a taste of that delicious book. It is a
quiet satire on the absurdly romantic such as is still manufactured and
sold by the million copies to readers who, one may suppose, have not
had the good fortune to read Jane Austen.

The heroines of “Northanger Abbey,” Catherine and Isabella, “shut
themselves up to read novels together. Yes, novels; for I will not
adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom, so common with novel
writers, of degrading, by their contemptuous censure, the very
performances to the number of which they are themselves adding; joining
with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on
such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own
heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn
over its insipid pages with disgust. Alas! if the heroine of one novel
be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect
protection and regard? I cannot approve of it. Let us leave it to
the reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and
over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with
which the press now groans. Let us not desert one another; we are an
injured body. Although our productions have afforded more extensive
and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation
in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried.
From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes are almost as many as our
readers; and while the abilities of the nine-hundredth abridger of
the ‘History of England,’ or of the man who collects and publishes in
a volume some dozen lines of Milton, Pope, and Prior, with a paper
from the _Spectator_, and a chapter from Sterne, are eulogized by
a thousand pens, there seems almost a general wish of decrying the
capacity and undervaluing the labor of the novelist, and of slighting
the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend
them. ‘I am no novel reader; I seldom look into novels; do not imagine
that _I_ often read novels; it is really very well for a novel.’ Such
is the common cant. ‘And what are you reading, Miss ----?’ ‘Oh, it is
only a novel!’ replies the young lady; while she lays down her book
with affected indifference, or momentary shame. ‘It is only “Cecilia,”
or “Camilla,” or “Belinda,”’ or, in short, only some work in which the
greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough
knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties,
the liveliest effusions of wit and humor, are conveyed to the world in
the best chosen language.”

Since that was written the novel has overridden its detractors by sheer
bulk and power. The greatest man in Russia, Tolstoi, is, or was, a
novelist. The greatest poet and thinker alive but yesterday in England,
George Meredith, was a novelist. Of the two wisest living writers in
America, one, Mr. William Dean Howells, is a novelist, and the other,
Mark Twain, whom one hardly knows how to rank or label, has done a part
of his best writing in the form of fiction. We no longer question the
power and dignity of the novel. Our only concern is to discriminate
good stories from bad and get the greatest delight and profit from the
good.

To bring our discussion to a vital example, let us consider Thackeray’s
“Henry Esmond,” an all but perfect fiction, in which every element of
excellent narrative is present.

The first element is plot. A story must begin in an interesting set
of circumstances and arrive by a series of events to a conclusion
that satisfies. The plot of “Esmond” is unusually well made, and it
is composed of rich matter. From the first chapter in which Henry is
introduced to us as “no servant, though a dependent, no relative,
though he bore the name and inherited the blood of the house”--a
youth with a mystery--on through the schemes for the restoration of
the Stuart King, through Esmond’s unsuccessful rivalry with the other
suitors of Beatrice, to the end of the high intrigues of politics and
the quiet conclusion of Esmond’s career, the story moves steadily
with well-mannered leisure. It takes its own time, but it takes the
right time, slow when events are preparing, rapid and flashing when
events come to a crisis. The great crisis, when Esmond overtakes the
prince at Castlewood, breaks his sword and renounces both allegiance
to the Stuarts and his own birthright, is one of the supreme dramatic
scenes in literature. There Thackeray matches, even excels, Scott and
Dumas. And such is the variety of his power that on other pages he
writes brilliant and witty comedy surpassed only by the lighter plays
of Shakespeare, on yet other pages he gives compact lucid summary of
events, the skill of which an historian might envy, and again he writes
pages of comment on human character which equal the best pages of
Esmond’s friend, “the famous Mr. Joseph Addison.”

The actors in these events are as distinct and memorable as any in
history or as any in life. It would be impossible for a reader not
well acquainted with the age of Queen Anne to tell which of the
personages in the book once moved in the flesh and which Thackeray
created. And readers who have a wide acquaintance with the world and
have known many of its sons and daughters will find in their gallery of
memories no brilliant and heartless woman whom they seem to remember
with more sense of intimacy and understanding than the woman who led
Mr. Esmond such an uncomfortable dance and was the means of defeating
Stuart ambitions--Beatrice Esmond. How are these personages of a
fiction made to seem so lifelike? Genius only can answer, and genius is
often unaware by just what devices a character is made to take on its
own life and to walk, as it were, independent of the author. One thing
is generally true of characters that strike us as real: they talk each
in a style of his own, and yet they talk “like folks.” The thing that
they do may be far removed from anything in our experience, a soldier
may be talking to a king, Esmond may be speaking in noble anger to the
prince; we feel somehow that the words on the page have in them the
sound of the human voice, that a man placed in such circumstances would
think and speak as the novelist makes him speak.

In a good novel human beings, whose emotions represent and idealize
our own, act and talk amid intelligible circumstances and entertaining
events. These persons, since they seem real, are visible to the eye of
fancy and the events happen in scenes--the divisions of a drama are
called “scenes”--which strike the imagination as if they were actually
striking the senses. Each person is recognizable by look and gesture;
each place is distinct from all other places, as the room you sit in
and the street beyond your window are different from all other rooms
and all other highways in the world. Our master of story telling is a
master of description. An unskillful author tries to persuade us that
a woman is beautiful by merely asserting it, and his assertion makes
no impression on us because it appeals to the part of our brain that
collects information and not the part that sees pictures. But Thackeray
paints Miss Beatrice tripping down the stairs to greet Esmond, and no
eye that has seen her through Thackeray’s words but can recall the
portrait at will. Further description of Beatrice accompanies the
action all through the book and no one can tell, or cares to tell,
where narration pauses and description begins.

No one can tell, either, where out of all this emerges that quality of
writing called style. Manner of expression is not a separable shell
in which the stuff is contained like a kernel. The manner is in the
substance. Yet there is a charm of words felt for itself which seems to
lie above and around the thing conveyed. In other books Thackeray loses
his plot, and sometimes apparently forgets his characters, and yet
he carries the reader on by virtue of saying things compellingly and
invitingly. When, as in “Esmond,” the order of action is so satisfying
and the people are so interesting to watch and be with, and in
addition every page is a delight to the ear, then literary excellence
is complete.

[Illustration: THACKERAY]

Here, united in one book, are the elements of fiction--plot, character,
description and style. And from these elements, however blended, there
results a total value, the measure of a book’s importance in relation
to the other things in life. This value is essentially moral, not so
much because literature is under peculiar obligations to preach and
teach morality as because it is part of life and the fundamental things
in life are moral in the large sense of the word. It is as impossible
to think of a fiction which shall be neither moral nor immoral as
to think of an act which shall be, in the modern meaningless word,
unmoral. Even a very slight fiction, like a trivial act, weighs on
one side or the other. All the best of our novelists have been fully
conscious of their ethical obligations to their readers. Having thought
deeply enough about life to write about it, they could not have failed
to think deeply about their professional responsibility, their part in
life.

I am going to quote at length a passage from Anthony Trollope’s “Life
of Thackeray” in the series of biographies known as _English Men of
Letters_. The young reader can find no better book about the novel than
this account of one great novelist by another. In spite of a current
idea that shop-talk is not interesting, a thoughtful craftsman talking
about his work is likely to be at his best. Moreover, Trollope’s
judgments on the moral obligation of the novelist are especially worthy
of confidence, for he is no heavy-handed preacher, no metaphysical
critic, but a broad-minded humorist, an affectionate student of human
nature, a cheerful workman who regarded his own books in a modest
businesslike way.

“I have said previously,” says Trollope, “that it is the business
of a novel to instruct in morals and to amuse. I will go further,
and will add, having been for many years a prolific writer of novels
myself, that I regard him who can put himself into close communication
with young people year after year without making some attempt to do
them good, as a very sorry fellow indeed. However poor your matter
may be, however near you may come to that ‘foolishest of existing
mortals,’ as Carlyle presumes some unfortunate novelist to be, still,
if there be those who read your works, they will undoubtedly be more
or less influenced by what they find there. And it is because the
novelist amuses that he must be influential. The sermon too often has
no such effect, because it is applied with the declared intention of
having it. The palpable and overt dose the child rejects; but that
which is cunningly insinuated by the aid of jam or honey is accepted
unconsciously, and goes on upon its curative mission. So it is with
the novel. It is taken because of its jam and honey. But, unlike the
honest and simple jam and honey of the household cupboard, it is never
unmixed with physic. There will be the dose within it, either curative
or poisonous. The girl will be taught modesty or immodesty, truth or
falsehood; the lad will be taught honor or dishonor, simplicity or
affectation. Without the lesson the amusement will not be there. There
are novels which certainly can teach nothing; but then neither can they
amuse any one.

“I should be said to insist absurdly on the power of my own fraternity
if I were to declare that the bulk of the young people in the upper and
middle classes receive their moral teaching chiefly from the novels
they read. Mothers would no doubt think of their own sweet teaching;
fathers of the examples which they set; and schoolmasters of the
excellence of their instructions. Happy is the country that has such
mothers, fathers, and schoolmasters! But the novelist creeps in closer
than the schoolmaster, closer than the father, closer almost than the
mother. He is the chosen guide, the tutor whom the young pupil chooses
for herself. She retires with him, suspecting no lesson, safe against
rebuke, throwing herself head and heart into the narration as she can
hardly do into her task work; and there she is taught--how she shall
learn to love; how she shall receive the lover when he comes; how far
she should advance to meet the joy; why she should be reticent, and not
throw herself at once into this new delight. It is the same with the
young man, though he would be more prone even than she to reject the
suspicion of such tutorship. But he, too, will learn either to speak
the truth, or to lie; and will receive from his novel lessons either
of real manliness, or of that affected apishness and tailor-begotten
demeanor which too many professors of the craft give out as their
dearest precepts.

“At any rate the close intercourse is admitted. Where is the house
now from which novels are tabooed? Is it not common to allow them
almost indiscriminately, so that young and old each chooses his own
novel? Shall he, then, to whom this close fellowship is allowed--this
inner confidence--shall he not be careful what words he uses, and
what thoughts he expresses, when he sits in council with his young
friend?... A novelist has two modes of teaching--by good example or
bad. It is not to be supposed that because the person treated of be
evil, therefore the precept will be evil. If so, some personages
with whom we have been acquainted from our youth upward would have
been omitted in our early lessons. It may be a question whether the
teaching is not more efficacious which comes from an evil example.
What story was ever more powerful in showing the beauty of feminine
reticence, and the horrors of feminine evildoing, than the fate of
Effie Deans [in “The Heart of Midlothian” by Scott]. The ‘Templar’ [in
Scott’s “Ivanhoe”] would have betrayed a woman to his lust, but has
not encouraged others by the freedom of his life. ‘Varney’ [in Scott’s
“Kenilworth”] was utterly bad--but though a gay courtier, he has
enticed no others to go the way he went. So has it been with Thackeray.
His examples have generally been of that kind--but they have all been
efficacious in their teaching on the side of modesty and manliness,
truth, and simplicity.”

To return to the elements of the novel, plot, character, description,
style, if we think of a score of great novels that have had many
readers for many years, we shall see that some novelists are blessed
with genius for one element more than for another, or that they have
chosen to put their energies into one or the other. And we shall see,
too, that few novels are perfect, few as nearly perfect as “Esmond,”
and that we should not expect them to be. All that we need demand is
that a writer give us enough of something to make the reading of his
book worth while.

No rules that have so far been laid down about the requirements
of fiction are final or from the reader’s point of view of great
assistance. Some of us have made up our minds that the English novel
is growing more shapely and well constructed: Mr. W. D. Howells, for
instance, by precept and practice, and some other novelists and critics
who are under the influence of French fiction, insist on construction
and form and simplicity of plot. Then in spite of all “tendencies” and
rules of fiction, along comes Mr. William De Morgan with three novels
which might have been written fifty years ago, and wins instantaneous
and deserved success as a new novelist--at the age of seventy. His
plots are as wayward and leisurely as most of Thackeray’s, his people
are human, and his discursive individual style is as fresh as if
novelists had not been filling the world with books for two centuries.
“Joseph Vance” and “Alice-for-Short” prove how inconsiderate genius is
of rules made by critics and how far is the “old-fashioned” novel from
having gone stale and fallen on evil days.

So long as a plot has vitality of some kind, truth to life, or
ingenuity, or dramatic power, it makes no difference to the mere
reader what material the novelist chooses. Twenty years ago there was
a strange contest between realists and romanticists. The realists, or
as they sometimes call themselves, “naturalists,” take the simpler
facts of common life and weave them into stories. The romanticist
selects from highly colored epochs of history, or from no-man’s land,
or from the more unusual circumstances of actual life, such startling
adventures, such well-joined incidents, such mysteries, surprises,
and dramatic revelations as we do not meet with in ordinary times and
places. Thackeray is a romanticist in “Henry Esmond,” a realist in
“Pendennis” and “The Newcomes.” Scott’s novels are romantic. Those
of Trollope, of Mr. Henry James, of Mr. W. D. Howells are realistic.
There is no sharp line between the two. Dickens found extraordinary
romance in ordinary London streets, which he knew with journalistic
realism to the last brick and cobblestone. In “Bleak House,” he says,
he “purposely dwelt upon the romantic side of familiar things.” But,
though he may have considered this book a special quest for the
romantic in real life, it does not differ in the kind or the proportion
of its romanticism from a dozen others of his novels. It is no more
romantic than “David Copperfield” or “The Old Curiosity Shop,” no less
romantic than the historical fiction, “A Tale of Two Cities.” His
imagination penetrated life, real or unreal, familiar or remote, and
found it rich with plot and subplot; he touched the slums with his
mythmaker’s wand, and in obedience to his touch the children of the
streets and dark tenements became heroes of strange adventure, moving
through mysteries as varied and wonderful as fairyland.

Because Dickens loved human beings and understood their everyday
sorrow and happiness, he wrought into the great fabric of his plots
a multitude of people as real, as like to us and our friends, as can
be found in the work of the most thorough-going realist; he reflects,
too, like the avowed realist, the social and political problems of
his own times. He is both romanticist and realist. So also are his
contemporaries, the Brontë sisters and Charles Reade. And their
greatest successors in the English novel, Thomas Hardy and George
Meredith, are equally masters of common social facts, human nature in
its daily aspects, and of the highly colored, the picturesque, the
mystery, the surprise, the dramatic complexity of events.

The genius of English fiction in most of its powerful exponents has
this dual character of romance and realism. “Robinson Crusoe” is a
romantic adventure; its scene is transported far away from human life
to a solitude such as only the wanderer’s eye has looked upon; the
reader is taken bodily into another world. Yet Defoe is the first great
realist in English prose fiction; he piles detail upon detail, gives
an exact inventory of Crusoe’s possessions, and compels belief in the
story as in a chronicle of events that really happened.

Later in the eighteenth century appeared Richardson’s “Clarissa
Harlowe,” a vast romantic tragedy, which held the attention of all
novel readers of the time; the story was published in parts, and when
it was learned before the last part was printed that the ending was to
be tragic, ladies wrote to Richardson begging him to bring his heroine
out of her difficulties and allow her to “live happily ever after.” The
plot of this novel is imposed by the logic of character upon the facts
of English society; the plot is not realistic or even probable in its
relations to the known circumstances of the civilization in which it is
laid; any magistrate could have rescued Clarissa. But everything stands
aside to let the great romance pass by; the readers of the time, who
knew better than we do the social facts surrounding an English girl,
did not question the probability of the plot, because they accepted
the character. The plot granted, Richardson’s method is realistic. We
know Clarissa’s daily acts and circumstances; we have a bulletin of her
feelings every hour. No modern psychological novelist ever analyzed
the workings of a human mind more minutely, with greater fidelity and
insight. The result is a voluminous diary of eighteenth-century manners
and customs and sentiments hung upon as romantic a plot as was ever
devised.

Midway in time between Richardson and Dickens stands the king
of romantics, Scott, and he, too, is a realist in his depiction
of Scottish life and character. In “The Bride of Lammermoor” so
melodramatic and “stagey” that it seems to be set behind footlights
and played to music--a familiar opera is based upon it--there is one
character that Scott found not in legend or history, but in the life
he knew, Caleb Balderstone. Like the gravedigger in “Hamlet,” he is
a link between unusual, we might fairly say unnatural, events and
common humanity. In many of Scott’s novels, beside the strutting heroes
that startle the world in high astounding terms, walk the soldiers,
servants, parsons, shepherds, who by their presence make us feel that
it is the firm earth upon which the action moves.

Argument among critics as to the nature of romance and realism helps,
as all questions of definition may help, to make us understand the
relation of one novel to another and to see the range and purpose of
fiction. But that any one should say of two novels that one is better
than the other, simply because it is more realistic or more romantic,
is to impose a technicality on enjoyment with which enjoyment refuses
to be burdened. Who that picks up a novel for the pleasure of reading
it cares whether it is romance or realism? So long as it has vitality
of its own kind, and gives us enough of the many virtues which a novel
may possess, we are content to plunge into it and ask no questions.
A lily is not a rose; it takes no great wisdom to know that; the
botanists will tell us the exact difference, and the gardener will
tell us how they grow; but if botanist or horticulturist tells us
which is more beautiful, we listen to his opinion and keep our own.
Mr. Kipling’s “Kim,” or Mr. Howells’s “A Modern Instance”; “Far from
the Madding Crowd,” by Thomas Hardy, or Scott’s “Ivanhoe”; Stevenson’s
“Kidnapped,” or Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn”--which of these books
is realistic and which is the other kind? Suppose you read them to
find out. In the midst of any one of them you will have forgotten the
question, because the novelist will have filled your whole mind with
other--and more important--interests.

A good novel is a self-contained, complete world with its own laws and
inhabitants. The inhabitants and laws of different novels resemble
each other in some degree or we should not be able to understand them.
Great books, and great men, have common qualities, and yet it is true,
in large measure, that they are memorable for their _difference_ from
other books and men. This suggests why histories of literature and
analytical studies of the forms of literature are so often artificial
and lifeless. The critic is fond of grouping books and authors
together, of finding points of resemblance, of marking genius with
brands and labels. In some histories of Elizabethan drama, Shakespeare
is neatly placed in the center of a rising and declining “school of
playwrights.” He is laid out like the best specimen of a collection
in a glass case. Shakespeare was a playwright; no doubt he was a
“practical” one. But the important thing about him is that he was the
greatest of poets, and he is not at ease in any school or class of
literary workmen. He is inexplicably, gigantically different from all
other Elizabethan dramatists, and if he is to be grouped at all, his
fellows are the few greatest poets of the world, not his contemporaries
in the art, or the business, of playmaking, the best of whom do not
reach to his shoulder. All the supreme creative geniuses are difficult
to classify. They work in conventional art forms, the drama, the epic,
in which scores of lesser poets have worked; but the greatest art
emerges above the form. When rules of art and sharp characterizations
of schools of art fit snugly on the shoulders of a writer, that alone
is sufficient to prove that he is not a writer of the highest power.

[Illustration: SCOTT]

However wisely critics and philosophers may argue about fiction and
other forms of art, inexperienced readers will be narrowing their
outlook if they make up their minds, after one or two experiments
or as a result of a critical opinion which they get at second hand,
that there are certain classes of stories that they do not like. If
one knows that Stevenson is a romanticist and happens to have read
“David Balfour” and failed to like it, it is foolish to rule out the
romantic, for perhaps Dumas will prove better. Some people are tired
beyond recovery of historical novels, because so many bad ones have
been urged upon the public during the last fifteen years. Some people
have decided that they do not like stories that end unhappily. This
seems a thoughtless decision because many of the great fictions from
the “Iliad” to “The Mill on the Floss” terminate with the death of the
principal characters and sadness for the characters that survive. When
we hear some one say, “There is tragedy enough in real life, I want
something pleasant to read,” we may suggest that the great tragedy that
is told in the Gospels has brought more lasting joy and good feeling to
the race than any other story. Not to make so high an argument, I feel
that I could give to any person who pretends to like only “pleasant”
fiction a half dozen tragic novels that would capture and delight this
sad soul that has seen enough of “tragedy in real life.”

Arguments are unnecessary, for fiction itself outstrips them or
defeats them and triumphs. The public is tired, we say, of historical
romance, and it cannot be charmed by sad stories which end in death
and disaster. Yet during the past winter one of “best sellers” was
Miss Mary Johnston’s “Lewis Rand.” This is an historical romance laid
in Jefferson’s Virginia. It is a tragic romance; the finest gentleman
is killed, the titular hero goes to prison on the last page, a ruin of
ambitious genius, and the heroine, his wife, parts from us at the end
to enter, in the world that lies just beyond the covers of books, a
life of inevitable sadness.

Individual vitality is what makes the good book. When the good book
appears we like to classify it and examine its form and material,
but its vitality defies us. You may group all your friends and
acquaintances in familiar types, and in thinking of them when they
are absent you may assure yourself that they fall into definite
intelligible classes. But in the presence of any one of them, the most
transparent and simple, you recognize the mystery of a person, a power,
however slight, that is unlike other powers, a vital soul that baffles
analysis. And so it is with books: each makes its effect as a living
individual and it may have an entirely different effect from the book
that seems nearest like it.

Somebody once expressed the idea that he did not care for Dickens
because so many of his characters are low persons who would not be
interesting to associate with in real life; and other readers have
expressed the same idea, either sincerely or in thoughtless repetition.
If they do not like Dickens, it is probably for some other reason than
that Dickens portrays “common” people, for that reason is not broad
enough to stand on. These same readers may like another writer whose
characters are as low and uncultivated as most of the people whom
Dickens loved. If such a writer is not to be found in our libraries,
his first book may be still unpublished; he may walk to-morrow into the
town where we live, discover the humor and pathos of our commonplace
neighbors, and of the low persons whom we do not acknowledge as
neighbors. And ever after our village will be a shrine for tourists.
The great fiction writer is a magician; he upsets conventional values
in a flash and turns lead into gold in spite of all the chemists. The
true reader of fiction will be a believer in that miracle, and he will
keep his mind receptive to it in every form in which it manifests
itself.




CHAPTER IV

THE READING OF FICTION--(_Continued_)


In discussing the question of plots we could not keep out the question
of character, which we agreed for the purposes of our discussion is
the second element of fiction. In importance it is the first--the
indispensable element. What is fiction for except to tell us about
human beings? I cannot believe what somebody said, that the three
essentials of stories are first plot, second plot and third plot. In
the first place, that sounds too clever to be true and in the second
place--it is not true. The plot is the means of keeping persons in
action so that we can get to know them. In this “naturalists” and
“realists” find a good argument, for they put their emphasis on human
character. They say: “Here we exhibit you and your friends and your
enemies. Plot? We are telling a story. Stories are all about you. But
we have not forced events out of probable order or distorted the facts
of life beyond recognition for the sake of an exciting situation. We
draw our fellow men, so that you recognize them as they are. Even as
they are in their homes and shops and churches, so they are in these
pages, talking, loving, hating, bargaining, intriguing, dying. We
select the significant, we heighten the values of life; but we portray
life essentially as it is.” True enough. The realist gives us “folks.”
But he has no monopoly of human beings. We are quite as well acquainted
with Alice who wandered in Wonderland and went through the Looking
Glass as we are with Mr. David Copperfield and Miss Maggie Tulliver.
Peter Pan (in Mr. J. M. Barrie’s play), who flew in the face of nature
and refused to grow up, is so true a person that all the children
recognized him at once and old men chuckled and remembered him.

The English novel is varied and abundant, and its characters,
collectively, form a populous democracy. Everybody is in it somewhere
from peasant to king, and if some of us and our friends have been left
out, new novelists are at hand watching every kind and grade of life
and preparing to fix it in a living page. The American novel is not yet
old and broad enough to have captured all our types of men and women
and recreated them in fiction. But a good beginning has been made. The
varied voices of the American country town are heard from all corners
of the land, but so far most of them have been voices of short compass,
incapable of sustained utterance. We still depend for studies of
American character on sketches and short stories, and these in the mass
are an important body of literature. New England, Virginia, California,
the Middle West, the great cities, have had their short-story writers.
The novelists are still on the way. Our national life is so scattered
and changing that the novelist has difficulty in keeping a group of
Americans together long enough to plot them into a large book. In
Europe where a small town contains every kind of society the novelist
finds the compact social stage all set and characters in abundance.
Anthony Trollope, with little care to plot, sets society to turning in
the quiet eddy of a small cathedral town and presently we are looking
into the heart of England. He introduces the same people into novel
after novel and we are always glad to see them again. The success of
his many novels supports the contention that characters are the staff
of fiction. A defect of plot is easier to pardon than a defect in
character drawing.

Untruth to human nature, violence either to its waking experiences or
its dreams, destroys a book, destroys the living world it represents
and leaves us holding a thing of ink and paper. The other day I was
reading a novel which has multiplied itself over the land by force
of printing presses and sensational advertising. It is a story about
modern people of an undistinguished but potentially interesting kind;
the heroine is, if I remember right, a confidential secretary to a
business man. The author makes her say something like this to her lover:

“Ere I knew you, there had come into my life but few pleasures and
diversions; I had been like a bird shut up in a cage; and you set me
free. Yet it was not that alone which attracted me to you. Grateful as
I was, I was charmed, too, by your conversation which was so totally
different than (_sic_) anything I had known heretofore. You saved me
from the wretched monotony of commonplace existence and took me into a
new world, and my gratitude for that blossomed into love”; and so on.

The only thing in that which sounds like human speech is the blunder
in the use of “than,” which I suspect is an unintentional blunder on
the part of the author. The speech is no more appropriate to the given
character in the given place than a sentence out of Macaulay’s essays.
The most ingenious plotting could not entice a discriminating reader
beyond that dead line of empty words, for they are proof enough that
the author himself does not know his heroine’s character. To be sure,
dialogue in novels cannot be “natural as life,” for actual conversation
taken down word for word is diffuse and hard to read. The conversations
in books must sound natural, appropriate to the place, the time, and
the character of the person whom the reader is expected to believe
in. There cannot be any rules for making conversation; if there are
any rules they are for the novelists to study, not for the reader.
The reader only knows whether the speeches sound right or whether the
author is cheating him by passing off as talk mere words which the
author strung out on paper and did not hear with his inner sense from
the lips of his character.

In the same book there is a description which I will quote, if I can
resist the temptation to parody it:

“The house nestled amid the verdurous shade of immense trees; to
the left of the wooded park were sloping lawns dotted here and there
with beds of the most exquisite flowers, which in contrast to the old
weatherbeaten house greatly enhanced the beauty of the scene. Inside
the house the utmost good taste prevailed from the antique colonial
hatrack in the front hall to the handsome, but simple furniture of the
parlor, in one corner of which on a sofa that was a cherished heirloom,
a young girl might have been seen sitting engaged in embroidering a
fine piece of linen. She was beautiful with large dark eyes and a
luxuriant mass of richest brown hair,” and so on.

Except for the poor fun of making sport of the author no one with a
sense of humor will read beyond that. The author himself cannot see
the place he would present to his reader’s eye. Description, which we
have chosen to regard as the third element of fiction, must aid the
imagination to realize the events and the people or it is worse than
ineffectual. The novelist whose story is “dotted here and there” with
descriptions which really “enhance the beauty” of his story is to be
numbered among the immortals.

The masters of description touch in details of sound and vision as they
progress with the narrative, and the reader hears and sees without
being aware that he has read description. The more leisurely novelists,
who are great enough to carry a story through three volumes, do often
stop and paint a picture, and even the great ones frequently fail to
get the pictorial effect they seek. Scott’s descriptions sometimes
interfere with his story and descend into a catalogue of details.
But the total effect of his description is to make the entire world
familiar with Scotland, streets, houses, mountains, and moors. It is
part of Scott’s patriotic purpose to preserve in a series of novels the
legend, the history, the character, the ideals, the social customs of
old and new Scotland; and he allows himself, as a kind of antiquarian,
all the space he needs for minute description. So his descriptions
serve a purpose, even when they lack imaginative vision. Moreover, the
great river of his stories is broad and swift enough to carry an amount
of dead wood which would choke narratives of lesser volume and power.

A great example of a long descriptive passage in fiction is in the
fifty-fifth chapter of “David Copperfield.” There is to be action
enough presently to sweep the reader off his feet; in preparation for
it Dickens gives three or four pages of description of the storm. The
excellence of that description grows upon the reader who finds how
seldom even the better novelists succeed in painting on large canvases.
Few artists in prose have been adequate to the greatness of the sea.
Stevenson has succeeded in giving both the seas on the Scotch coast and
the Pacific with its mysterious islands. Of living writers in English
the masters of “sea pieces” are Mr. Rudyard Kipling and Mr. Joseph
Conrad. But none of the younger writers, even of those especially
devoted to the sea, has excelled Dickens, landsman and London cockney
as he was, in that great picture of the storm.

I once knew some young ladies who were enamored of the books of that
third-rate novelist, Miss Marie Corelli. To be fair, I never read
but two of her novels, and though they are so false that I doubt her
ability to write anything beautiful and true, she may have written
masterpieces that I have unfortunately missed. The young ladies had
named their club after one of Miss Corelli’s books. I asked one
worshipper what she liked in her favorite novelist. The reply was
startling: “I love the beautiful descriptions.” It was interesting
to find a young lady who liked beautiful descriptions for their own
sake--most of us are not so far advanced in our critical enjoyment of
fiction--and it was interesting to learn that Miss Corelli had written
beautiful descriptions. But when I ungraciously pressed the matter, my
friend confessed that she could not find any descriptive passage that
seemed especially worth exhibiting.

The secret of this case, if we are ungallant enough to subject to
inquisition so tender a thing as a young lady’s conscience and
literary tastes, is that she had learned from some muddied source
that a beautiful description is a precious thing in a novel. She was
afraid that the things in the book which really interested her might
not be admirable--though I dare say they are harmless enough--and so
she presented that little white excuse for reading the novel. Just
so ladies who are not young have been known to admire a fiction of
doubtful character wholly for its “exquisite style,” when if they
really appreciated “exquisite style,” they would be reading something
else.

There is an enjoyment of style that seems either apart from the
other kinds of enjoyment in reading or is a refinement, an addition,
which makes the other kinds keener. In choosing novels, however,
we do not need, as a practical matter, to hunt for style, any more
than we need to hunt for descriptions, for the writer who is great
enough to contrive plots and draw characters must have learned how
to write well. The good novels are all in good style. The fiction
maker whose style is poor is almost certain to fail in other ways
and be altogether unacceptable. It is true that among the great ones
some have more distinction of manner than others. Thackeray never
writes so clumsily as Dickens at his worst. Stevenson’s phrasing is
invariably excellent, whereas a greater novelist, Walter Scott, often
for pages at a time throws off his sentences so hastily that they are
not easy, not pleasant, to read. Jane Austen in her style is near to
perfection; George Eliot, a writer of much more power, whose heights
of eloquence are not equaled by any other woman, seems sometimes to be
either expressing a kind of thought, or expressing it in a vocabulary
and with a complexity of construction, which would be tolerable in a
philosophic essay but is not suited to fictitious narrative. It is well
to begin to be aware of the degrees of style and their general effect,
to enjoy beauty and eloquence and grace in some measure for their own
sake. But the inexperienced reader is safe to choose his novels for
their substance; the style will usually be adequate and the merits of
the style will enter the reader’s consciousness gradually and without
effort of appreciation on his part.

In choosing novels the ordinary reader need not at first
concern himself with the history of a novelist or his technical
characteristics, or with the place which critics have given to him in
their schemes of literary development. A simple method of selection is
to find on somebody’s advice a novel that has interested many readers,
and then if it prove good, to try another by the same author. If a
writer has produced two novels that interest you, it is safe to assume
that he has written a third and a fourth. Some writers, it is true,
have been distinguished for a single masterpiece. “Don Quixote” is
the only book of Cervantes’ that we are likely to care for. “Robinson
Crusoe” is all that most people have found good in Defoe’s tales
(though there is much merit in his other stories). No other book of
Mrs. Stowe’s is even second to “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” “The Vicar of
Wakefield” is the glorious whole of Goldsmith’s narrative prose,
though he succeeded in every other form of literature, including the
prose drama. But the man who can write two novels can write three if
he has time; the two-novel power is likely to be a ten-novel power
with torpedo fleets of short stories and essays. Anyone who has liked
“Silas Marner” and “Middlemarch” will not need to be urged to read
“Felix Holt,” “Adam Bede,” “Romola,” “The Mill on the Floss.” The
person who has once read and enjoyed two novels of Dickens is likely
to read six or eight. “Pendennis” leads to “The Newcomes.” And any
of Trollope’s “Barchester,” novels is an introduction to the happily
interminable series.

[Illustration: HAWTHORNE]

I have purposely said little about the short story, because in this day
of magazines we all read short stories, some of them pretty good ones.
There are fifty persons who can write one or two acceptable short tales
to one who can make a novel of moderate merit. And the great writers of
the tale have often been novelists as well, so that if one begins to
read novels one will meet with the best short stories which have been
worth collecting into volumes. Readers of “The House of Seven Gables”
and “The Scarlet Letter” will make the acquaintance of Hawthorne’s
“Twice Told Tales” and “Mosses from an Old Manse.” Among modern
fictionists of importance Poe stands almost alone as a writer of tales
who never tried the longer and greater form of the novel, though there
are several excellent authors, such as Mr. Rudyard Kipling, Miss Sarah
Orne Jewett, Mrs. Mary Wilkins-Freeman, whose short tales outweigh in
value, if not in quantity, their more extended narratives.

In our discussion of fiction we have dwelt entirely on books for
adults and neglected what is known as juvenile fiction. Here again the
omission was intended. Juvenile fiction is certain to make its way
in more than ample supply into American homes, and I doubt whether
fiction that is wholly good for adults is not the best for boys
and girls of, say, thirteen. When our fathers and mothers, or our
grandfathers and grandmothers, were young, they read the newest book
by Dickens, Thackeray, Wilkie Collins, and were no worse for having
fewer “juveniles” than modern publishers purvey for the benefit of
the growing generation. I should think that Henty’s books, which have
merits, but were turned out on a steam lathe, would suggest that
Scott’s historical romances are better, and that the Pattys and Pollys
and Lucys and Brendas, whose adventures are chronicled in many an
entertaining series would speedily make way for heroines like Maggie
Tulliver and heroes like Master Tom Brown, whose youth is perennial.
When “juveniles” are really good, parents read them after children have
gone to bed. I do not know whether “Tom Brown at Rugby” is catalogued
by the careful librarians as a book for boys, but I am sure it is a
book for men. I dare say that a good many pairs of eyes that have
passed over the pages of Mr. John T. Trowbridge and Elijah Kellogg and
Louisa Alcott have been old enough to wear spectacles. And if Mrs. Kate
Douglas Wiggin ever thought that in “Timothy’s Quest” and “Rebecca” she
was writing books especially for the young, adult readers have long
since claimed her for their own. I have enjoyed Mr. A. S. Pier’s tales
of the boys at “St. Timothy’s,” though he planned them for younger
readers. We are told on good authority that _St. Nicholas_ and _The
Youth’s Companion_ appear in households where there are no children,
and they give a considerable portion of their space to serial stories
written for young people. Between good “juveniles” and good books for
grown persons there is not much essential difference.

Anyone who is old enough to make out the words can safely enter
the large world of the English and American novel. The chances of
encountering the few that are unfit for the young are slight. Ruskin in
his essay “Of Queens’ Gardens,” which treats of the education of girls,
says: “Whether novels, or poetry, or history be read, they should be
chosen, not for what is _out_ of them but for what is _in_ them. The
chance and scattered evil that may here and there haunt, or hide itself
in, a powerful book, never does any harm to a noble girl; but the
emptiness of an author oppresses her, and his amiable folly degrades
her.” A novel in our language that has been read and freely talked of
for many years is as safe as a church; and there are enough such novels
to keep one happily occupied during all the hours one can give to
reading fiction to the end of one’s days.


LIST OF FICTION

_Supplementary to Chapter IV_

The following list of novels, tales, and prose dramas is offered to the
young reader by way of suggestion and not as a “prescribed” list. Like
the other lists in this book it omits many masterpieces that will occur
immediately to the mind of the older reader, and it includes some
books that are not masterpieces. The notes, or “evaluations” as the
librarians call them, are arbitrary, indicating the private opinions
of the present Guide; they are sometimes extensive in the case of less
important writers and are omitted in the cases of the great masters.
The way to use the list is to run over it from time to time until you
form a bowing acquaintance with the names of a few authors and some of
their books. One title or another is likely to attract you or excite
your curiosity. If you follow the impulse of that aroused curiosity and
go get the book, the list will have served its purpose.

 EDMOND FRANÇOIS VALENTIN ABOUT (1828-85). _Le Roi des Montagnes._

Easy to read in French, and to be found translated into English.

 ÆSOP. _Fables._

Found in many editions, some especially selected and illustrated for
children.

 LOUISA MAY ALCOTT (1832-88). _An Old-Fashioned Girl._ _Little Women._
 _Little Men._ _Work._ _Jack and Jill._ _Jo’s Boys._

Miss Alcott has always been a favorite of young people. Her faithful
and wholesome stories of life in a New England country town entitle
her to place in the delightful company of Rose Terry Cooke, Sarah Orne
Jewett, Mrs. Mary Wilkins-Freeman, and Miss Alice Brown.

 THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH (1836-1907). _The Story of a Bad Boy._ _Marjorie
 Daw._

A delicate romancer with subtle humor and a turn for paradoxical
ingenious fooling which is characteristic in one form or another of
American writers as unlike as Frank R. Stockton, Edward Everett Hale,
and Mark Twain.


 JAMES LANE ALLEN. _Flute and Violin._ _The Blue Grass Region._ _A
 Kentucky Cardinal._ _Aftermath._


 HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN (1805-75). _Fairy Tales._

To be found in _Everyman’s Library_. This collection of books,
published at fifty cents the volume by E. P. Dutton & Co., is perhaps
the best ever grouped in an inexpensive edition. It will be frequently
referred to in this and succeeding lists. Most of the books in it are
worth reading and no doubt worth buying, and this is true of most
“Universal Libraries,” “Libraries of the World’s Best Literature,”
“Five-Foot Book Shelves,” etc. But for variety’s sake one would wish
not to have all the books on one’s shelves in the same style of type
and binding. And in general it is better to buy the book one wants,
distinguished by its title and author, than to take as a whole any
editor’s or publisher’s collection of “classics.”


 RASMUS BJÖRN ANDERSON. _Norse Mythology._

The simplest form in which to read the stories of the Eddas and
Scandinavian myths. It is at once a lore book for students and a
wonder book for young and old.

_Arabian Nights._ In a volume of _Everyman’s Library_. Another good
edition is that prepared by Andrew Lang.


 JANE AUSTEN (1775-1817). _Sense and Sensibility._ _Pride and
 Prejudice._ _Mansfield Park._ _Emma._ _Northanger Abbey._ _Persuasion._

In _Everyman’s Library_.


 HONORÉ DE BALZAC (1799-1850). _Atheist’s Mass._ _The Chouans._ _Christ
 in Flanders._ _Eugénie Grandet._ _Old Goriot._ _The Quest of the
 Absolute._ _Wild Ass’s Skin._

These are the works of Balzac found in translation in _Everyman’s
Library_. All the novels of Balzac have been translated into English.
Balzac is not the easiest of French novelists to read in the original,
though not very difficult. The young American who will take the
trouble, and give himself the pleasure, of reading a score of French
novels will find himself with a good reading knowledge of the language,
and school and college examinations in French will lose their terror.


 JAMES MATTHEW BARRIE. _Auld Licht Idylls._ _A Window in Thrums._ _The
 Little Minister._ _Sentimental Tommy._ _Tommy and Grizel._

Mr. Barrie has the most tender and whimsical imagination of living
writers in English. His later work has been largely for the stage.


 RICHARD DODDRIDGE BLACKMORE (1825-1900). _Lorna Doone._


 GEORGE HENRY BORROW (1803-81). _Lavengro._ _Romany Rye._

In _Everyman’s Library_.


 CHARLOTTE BRONTË (1816-55). _Jane Eyre._


 EMILY BRONTË (1818-48). _Wuthering Heights._


 ALICE BROWN. _King’s End._ _Meadow Grass._ _Tiverton Tales._


 JOHN BROWN (1810-82). _Rab and His Friends._

In _Everyman’s Library_.


 THOMAS BULFINCH. _The Age of Chivalry, or Legends of King Arthur._
 _The Age of Fable, or Beauties of Mythology._ _Legends of Charlemagne,
 or Romance of the Middle Ages._

The prose storehouse of Arthurian legend in English is Thomas Mallory’s
“Morte d’Arthur,” which is in two volumes in _Everyman’s Library_.
But Mallory is not easy reading. The finest versions are those by the
poets, Tennyson’s “Idylls of the King,” Matthew Arnold’s “Tristram and
Iseult,” Swinburne’s “Tale of Balen.” Modern prose versions suited
to young readers are Howard Pyle’s “Story of King Arthur and his
Knights,” Sidney Lanier’s “Boy’s King Arthur” and Andrew Lang’s “Book
of Romance.” Legends allied to the Arthurian stories are found in
Lady Guest’s “Mabinogian,” which appears in one volume in _Everyman’s
Library_. See also “The Boy’s Mabinogian,” by Sidney Lanier.

The stories of Charlemagne are found in a volume suited for young
readers edited by Alfred John Church.

Classic mythology in its highest form is, of course, to be found in the
Greek and Roman poets, and it permeates English poetry. Prose versions
of Greek and Roman tales suited to young readers are to be found in
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Wonder Book” and “Tanglewood Tales,” Charles
Kingsley’s “The Heroes, or Greek Fairy Tales for My Children,” and
“Stories from the Greek Tragedians,” by Alfred John Church. See also “A
Child’s Guide to Mythology,” by Helen A. Clarke.


 HENRY CUYLUR BUNNER (1855-96). _Short Sixes._

Among the best American short stories.


 JOHN BUNYAN (1628-88). _The Pilgrim’s Progress._

In _Everyman’s Library_ and many other cheap editions.


 FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT. _Little Lord Fauntleroy._ _Editha’s Burglar._
 _Sara Crewe._


 FRANCES BURNEY (Madame d’Arblay, 1752-1840). _Evelina._


 GEORGE WASHINGTON CABLE. _Old Creole Days._ _The Grandissimes._


 MIGUEL DE CERVANTES SAAVEDRA (1547-1616). _Don Quixote._

[Illustration: COOPER]

In Motteux’s translation in two volumes of _Everyman’s Library_, and
other popular editions.


 SAMUEL LANGHORNE CLEMENS (“Mark Twain”). _Tom Sawyer._ _The Prince
 and the Pauper._ _Huckleberry Finn._ _A Connecticut Yankee in King
 Arthur’s Court._ _Pudd’nhead Wilson._ _Personal Recollections of Joan
 of Arc._ _The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg._


 WILLIAM WILKIE COLLINS (1824-89). _The Woman in White._ _The
 Moonstone._


 JOSEPH CONRAD. _Youth._ _Falk._ _The Children of the Sea._ _Typhoon._

One of the most remarkable of recent writers, a Pole who adopted the
English language and has contributed to its beauties. Unsurpassed as a
writer of stories of the sea.


 JAMES FENIMORE COOPER (1789-1851). _The Spy._ _The Pilot._ _The Last
 of the Mohicans._ _The Prairie._ _The Pathfinder._ _The Deerslayer._
 _The Red Rover._

The young reader had better plunge into Cooper before he ceases to be
a young reader; not that the adult reader cannot enjoy these virile
narratives, which have been read all over the world for nearly a
century, they will always remain important records of early American
life; but better fiction soon displaces them, growth in literary taste
makes evident the defects which Mark Twain sets forth in his witty
essay on Cooper; and to have grown beyond Cooper without having met
and enjoyed him means a genuine loss.


 DINAH MARIA CRAIK (Mrs. Mulock, 1826-87). _John Halifax, Gentleman._


 FRANCIS MARION CRAWFORD (1854-1909). _Mr. Isaacs._ _Dr. Claudius._
 _Saracinesca._ _Sant’ Ilario._ _A Cigarette Maker’s Romance._

Crawford had a vein of real genius which is obscured by the great
number of his less meritorious books.


 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS (1824-92). _Prue and I._

This pleasant, fine-hearted humorist should not be neglected by the
rising generation of Americans.


 GEORGE CUPPLES (1822-91). _The Green Hand._


 RICHARD HENRY DANA (1815-82). _Two Years Before the Mast._

It is a happy accident that Dana’s name follows that of Cupples. Fifty
years ago in “The Green Hand” and “Two Years Before the Mast” England
and America held command of the sea in fiction. This is an appropriate
place to mention three books by the American writer, Herman Melville
(1819-91), “Omoo,” “Typee” and “Moby Dick,” which are big enough to
sail in the fleet with Cupples and Dana. Sea craft are growing larger
every year but not sea books, though Mr. Joseph Conrad, Mr. Rudyard
Kipling, Mr. Frank Bullen and Mr. Clark Russell are taking us on good
voyages under sail and steam.


 ALPHONSE DAUDET (1840-97). _Le Petit Chose._ _Jack._ _Tartarin of
 Tarascon._ _Contes Choisis._

Among the easiest of French writers to read in the original. Several of
his books have been published in English.


 RICHARD HARDING DAVIS. _Gallegher._ _Van Bibber and Others._

Fresh and charming short stories by a writer who has not fulfilled the
promise of his youth.


 EDMONDO DE AMICIS. _Heart; A School Boy’s Journal._

A fine story of schoolboy life, to be found in English translation.


 DANIEL DEFOE (166?-1731). _Robinson Crusoe._


 WILLIAM DE MORGAN. _Joseph Vance._ _Alice-for-Short._ _Somehow Good._


 CHARLES DICKENS (1812-70).

No list of titles is necessary under the name of Dickens. There are
innumerable editions of his works.


 BENJAMIN DISRAELI (Lord Beaconsfield, 1804-81). VIVIAN GREY.
 CONINGSBY. LOTHAIR. SYBIL.


 CHARLES LUTWIDGE DODGSON (“Lewis Carroll”). _Alice’s Adventures in
 Wonderland._ _Through the Looking Glass._ _Silvie and Bruno._

And we could not be happy without “The Hunting of the Snark” and other
verses in Lewis Carroll’s “Rhyme and Reason.”


 ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE. _Adventures of Sherlock Holmes._ _Memoirs of
 Sherlock Holmes._ _Micah Clark._ _The White Company._

The fame of the Sherlock Holmes stories has thrown somewhat into the
background the best of Sir Conan Doyle’s work, the two historical
romances.


 ALEXANDRE DUMAS, Père (1803-70).

No list of titles is necessary under Dumas’s name. For though he and
his “syndicate” of assistants produced a great number of mediocre
works, those most frequently met in English are good, “The Three
Musketeers,” “The Count of Monte Cristo,” “The Queen’s Necklace” and
“Twenty Years After.”


 GEORGE DU MAURIER (1831-96). _Peter Ibbetson._ _Trilby._


 EDWARD EGGLESTON. _The Hoosier Schoolmaster._ _The Hoosier Schoolboy._


 GEORGE ELIOT (Mary Ann Evans, 1819-80).

No titles are necessary under George Eliot’s name. Several of her
novels are in _Everyman’s Library_, and there are other inexpensive
editions.


 ERCKMANN-CHATRIAN (Emile Erckmann and Louis Alexandre Chatrian).
 _Friend Fritz._ _The Blockade of Phalsburg._ _Madame Thérèse._ _The
 Story of a Conscript._ _Waterloo._

The two last named are in _Everyman’s Library_.


 ANATOLE FRANCE (Thibault). _Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard._ _From a
 Mother of Pearl Casket._

All the works of this writer are being translated into English. The
title given above in English is a translated collection of some of his
short stories.


 ALICE FRENCH (Octave Thanet). _Stories of a Western Town._


 ELIZABETH GASKELL (1810-65). _Cranford._


 JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE (1749-1832). _Wilhelm Meister’s
 Apprenticeship and Travels._

In Carlyle’s translation.


 OLIVER GOLDSMITH (1728-74). _The Vicar of Wakefield._ _She Stoops to
 Conquer._ _The Good-Natured Man._


 KENNETH GRAHAME. _The Golden Age._ _Dream Days._


 JAKOB AND WILHELM GRIMM. _Fairy Tales._

In _Everyman’s Library_.


 EDWARD EVERETT HALE (1822-1909). _The Man Without a Country._

The volume under this title, published by Little, Brown & Co., contains
the best of Dr. Hale’s short stories. The title story is a masterpiece
of fiction and the greatest of all sermons on patriotism.


 LUDOVIC HALÉVY. _The Abbé Constantin._

A charming story in simple French, and to be found translated into
English.


 THOMAS HARDY. _Far from the Madding Crowd._ _The Return of the
 Native._ _The Mayor of Casterbridge._ _A Pair of Blue Eyes._ _Under
 the Greenwood Tree._

Incomparably the greatest of living novelists of our race. Certain
characteristics of his later novels make them neither pleasant nor
intelligible to young readers, but any of those here mentioned is as
well adapted to the reader of any age as are George Eliot’s “Adam Bede”
and Thackeray’s “Pendennis.”


 JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS. _Uncle Remus._ _Nights with Uncle Remus._
 _Mingo._ _Free Joe._


 FRANCIS BRET HARTE (1839-1902). _The Luck of Roaring Camp._

The volume of this title, published by Houghton, Mifflin & Co.,
contains the best of Harte’s short stories, and the best remain very
good indeed, though since they took the world by storm other writers
have given us a truer insight into the life which Harte was the first
to discover and proclaim. Harte is a capital humorist in his way, both
in his swaggering hearty short stories (see “Colonel Starbottle’s
Client”) and in his parodies (see “Condensed Novels”).


 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE (1804-64).

No list of titles is necessary under Hawthorne’s name. America has no
other literary artist of his stature and perfection, and he is the one
American whose works we can say “you ought to read” entire--we dare say
it, that is, to American readers.


 MAURICE HEWLETT. _Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay._

Mr. Hewlett is one of the ten or twelve important living writers of
English fiction. I have seen no book of his which is not good. I give
only one title; his brilliant and varied achievement in the past decade
makes difficult the selection of other titles for this limited list.


 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES (1809-94). _Elsie Venner._ _Guardian Angel._

Holmes’s fiction is subordinate both to his essays and his poems, and
should be postponed until the reader has become a true lover of the
Autocrat. The novels are good for the reason, if for no other, that
Holmes was one of the rare geniuses who cannot write otherwise than
with wisdom and charm.


 ANTHONY HOPE (Hawkins). _The Prisoner of Zenda._

The first in point of time and excellence of a now numerous class of
historical novels in which the history and the geography as well as the
“story” are fictitious.


 WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS. _A Chance Acquaintance._ _The Lady of the
 Aroostook._ _Dr. Breen’s Practice._ _A Modern Instance._ _The Rise of
 Silas Lapham._ _The Minister’s Charge._ _April Hopes._ _The Flight of
 Pony Baker._


 THOMAS HUGHES (1823-96). _Tom Brown’s Schooldays._ _Tom Brown at
 Oxford._


 VICTOR HUGO (1812-85). _Les Miserables._ _Quatrevingt-Treize._ _Notre
 Dame de Paris._ _Les Travailleurs de la Mer._

Hugo’s novels appear in several English translations.


 HENRIK IBSEN. _Prose Dramas._

Edited and translated by William Archer and others. The reading of
Ibsen, the greatest dramatist of the nineteenth century, may be
postponed until the reader has come to mature views of life.


 WASHINGTON IRVING (1783-1859). _Sketch-Book._ _Tales of a Traveler._
 _Bracebridge Hall._


 W. W. JACOBS. _Many Cargoes._ _Light Freights._ _Dialstone Lane._

A teller of delightfully droll stories. Like Frank R. Stockton, a much
finer artist than the more serious-minded critics would be disposed to
admit. It is difficult to select for this list the best of the score of
talented short-story writers of the day. Perhaps this is a good place
to slip in the name of a contemporary American whose fresh and original
stories have deservedly survived their day in the magazines and been
collected in volumes--Mr. Sidney Porter, “O. Henry.”


 HENRY JAMES. _Roderick Hudson._ _Daisy Miller._ _The American._ _The
 Portrait of a Lady._ _The Princess Casamassima._

Young readers should beware of misleading chatter about Mr. James
which appears in columns of book gossip and newspaper comment; it
attempts to turn Mr. James into a joke and caricatures his subtlety
and obscurity; it is analogous to the flippant and derisive nonsense
through which Browning lived to reach the people at last. “Roderick
Hudson” is a great novel and is as clear, strong, and easy to read as
the work of any other thoughtful novelist you may choose for comparison.

[Illustration: ELIOT]


 SARAH ORNE JEWETT (1849-1909). _Country By-Ways._ _A Country Doctor._
 _A White Heron._ _Strangers and Wayfarers._ _The Country of the
 Pointed Firs._

Stories of the better classes of New England country folk written in a
style of unblemished clarity and sweetness.


 MARY JOHNSTON. _Lewis Rand._


 CHARLES KINGSLEY (1819-75). _Alton Locke._ _Hypatia._ _Westward Ho!_


 RUDYARD KIPLING. _Plain Tales from the Hills._ _Many Inventions._
 _Wee Willie Winkie._ _Life’s Handicap._ _Soldiers Three._ _In Black
 and White._ _The Story of the Gadsbys._ _The Light that Failed._ _The
 Jungle Book._ _The Second Jungle Book._ _The Day’s Work._ _Captains
 Courageous._ _Kim._

In spite of a curiously eager disposition on the part of current
writers to regard Kipling’s career as over and done, he is the foremost
living writer of short stories in English, and of no other young living
writer can it be so safely averred that he has become one of the
established classics of his race.


 FRIEDRICH HEINRICH KARL DE LA MOTTE FOUQUÉ (1777-1843). _Undine._


 PIERRE LOTI (L. M. J. Viaud). _An Iceland Fisherman._

This and the autobiographical “Romance of a Child,” and several of
Loti’s books of travel are in English.


 EDWARD G. E. L. BULWER-LYTTON (1801-72). _Harold, the Last of the
 Saxon Kings._ _Last Days of Pompeii._

Lord Lytton is one of the Victorian novelists whose great reputation is
growing rapidly less, and deservedly so, but his historical novels are
more than worth reading.


 GEORGE MACDONALD (1824-1905). _David Elginbrod._ _Robert Falconer._
 _Sir Gibbie._ _At the Back of the North Wind._

A novelist whose popularity among younger readers is probably less than
his great merits.


 XAVIER DE MAISTRE (1764-1852). _La Jeune Sibérienne._


 ALESSANDRO MANZONI (1785-1873). _The Betrothed Lovers._

There are several English translations of this most famous of Italian
historical romances.


 FREDERICK MARRYAT (1792-1848). _Jacob Faithful._ _Peter Simple._ _Mr.
 Midshipman Easy._ _Masterman Ready._


 A. E. W. MASON. _The Four Feathers._

A story of bravery and cowardice of unusual merit.


 GUY DE MAUPASSANT (1850-93). _The Odd Number._

This is an English translation of some of Maupassant’s best tales.


 GEORGE MEREDITH (1828-1909). _Harry Richmond._ _Beauchamp’s Career._
 _Rhoda Fleming._ _Evan Harrington._

At his death the foremost English man of letters. A noble poet and
a novelist who easily stands among the few greatest of the century.
A taste for Meredith grows on the individual as it has grown on the
general world of readers. The novels in this list include not all the
greatest but the best for the new reader to try first.


 PROSPER MÉRIMÉE (1803-70). _Colomba._

In easy French, and has been translated into English.


 SILAS WEIR MITCHELL. _Hugh Wynne._ _Roland Blake._


 MARY RUSSELL MITFORD (1786-1855). _Our Village._


 WILLIAM MORRIS (1834-96). _The Well at the World’s End._

Readers who chance to like this prose poem by a devoted apostle of
liberty and beauty will be led to his other romances in prose and verse.


 MARY NOAILLES MURFREE (“Charles Egbert Craddock”). _In the Tennessee
 Mountains._ _Down the Ravine._ _In the Clouds._ _In the Stranger
 People’s Country._

Portrays the solitude and pathos of the life of the mountaineers of
Tennessee. In sincerity and the genuineness of the substance better
than in workmanship.


 _Nibelungenlied._

The story of the Treasure of the Nibelungs is told for young readers by
A. J. Church in “Heroes of Chivalry and Romance.” It is also found in
“Wagner Opera Stories” by G. E. Barber, and in “The Wagner Story Book”
by W. H. Frost. Any critical or biographical work on Wagner will take
the reader into this great German legend.


 FRANK NORRIS. _The Octopus._ _The Pit._

A serious novelist cut off in his prime before his work attained the
greatness that it seemed to promise.


 MARGARET OLIPHANT (1828-97). _Chronicles of Carlingford._ _A
 Beleaguered City._


 ALFRED OLLIVANT. _Bob, Son of Battle._

A first-rate story of a dog.


 THOMAS NELSON PAGE. _Elsket._ _In Ole Virginia._

A sincere and sympathetic portrayer of old and new Virginia. As is
generally true of American fictionists, he is better in the short
story than in the novel.


 GILBERT PARKER. _Pierre and His People._ _The Battle of the Strong._
 _Seats of the Mighty._


 ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS. _Fourteen to One._ _A Singular Life._


 EDEN PHILLPOTTS. _Children of the Mist._ _The Human Boy._ _The Secret
 Woman._

One of the distinguished living novelists of England.


 EDGAR ALLAN POE (1809-49). _Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque._

There are many single-volume editions of Poe’s short stories. An
inexpensive complete edition of Poe is published by G. P. Putnam’s
Sons. The best and final edition of Poe is that edited by Stedman and
Woodberry.


 JANE PORTER (1776-1850). _Scottish Chiefs._


 HOWARD PYLE. _Some Merry Adventures of Robin Hood._ _The Garden Behind
 the Moon._

Mr. Pyle’s books are delightful for the illustrations. The competence
of his painting and his dramatic and literary imagination make him
the foremost American illustrator, and the texts which he writes
to accompany his drawings are adequate, though not in themselves
remarkable.


 RUDOLF ERICH RASPE. _Surprising Adventures of Baron Münchausen._

In the translation edited by Thomas Seccombe. A selection of the
Münchausen stories for young people made by Dr. Edward Everett Hale, is
published by D. C. Heath & Co.


 CHARLES READE (1814-84). _The Cloister and the Hearth._ _Hard Cash._
 _Put Yourself in His Place._


 SAMUEL RICHARDSON (1689-1761). _Clarissa Harlowe._

There is an abridged edition of this very long novel.


 GEORGE SAND (A. L. A. Dupin, 1804-76). _Consuelo._ _The Little
 Fadette._ _The Devil’s Pool._ _Mauprat._

These and others of George Sand’s novels are in English.


 WALTER SCOTT (1771-1832).

No list of titles is necessary under Scott’s name.


 ERNEST THOMPSON SETON. _Biography of a Grizzly._

A nature writer who for the most part wisely and artistically embodies
his knowledge of animals in fiction where they are not subjected to
those acid tests of fact which have recently betrayed the base metal in
some of the other modern writers about nature.


 ANNA SEWELL. _Black Beauty._

The story of a horse; a tract in the interests of kindness to animals
which proved to be more than a tract, a charming and immensely popular
piece of imaginative writing.


 HENRYK SIENKIWICZ. _The Deluge._ _Quo Vadis._ _With Fire and Sword._

In the translation by Jeremiah Curtin.


 WILLIAM GILMORE SIMMS (1806-70). _The Scout._

A writer historically important to Americans because he had a great
vogue in his day and accomplished much in a time when there was no
American literature south of Poe’s Richmond. Simms is an inferior
writer, but “The Scout” is a vigorous narrative and will interest young
readers.


 RICHARD BRINSLEY SHERIDAN (1751-1816). _Dramatic Works._

In _Bohn’s Library_ and in one volume of _Everyman’s Library_.


 JOSEPH HENRY SHORTHOUSE. _John Inglesant._


 ANNIE TRUMBULL SLOSSON. _Seven Dreamers._ _Story-Tell Lib._


 FRANCIS HOPKINSON SMITH. _Colonel Carter of Cartersville._


 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON (1849-94). _Treasure Island._ _Prince Otto._
 _Kidnapped._ _David Balfour._ _The Merry Men._ _Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
 Hyde._ _The Black Arrow._ _The Master of Ballantrae._ _St. Ives._


 FRANK RICHARD STOCKTON (1834-1902). _Rudder Grange._ _The Casting Away
 of Mrs. Lecks and Mrs. Aleshine._ _The Floating Prince and Other Fairy
 Tales._ _The Lady or the Tiger?_ _A Chosen Few._ _A Story-Teller’s
 Pack._


 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE (1812-96). _Uncle Tom’s Cabin._


 RUTH MCENERY STUART. _The Golden Wedding._ _Sonny._

Perhaps the wittiest of all contemporaneous writers about southern life.


 JONATHAN SWIFT (1667-1745). _Gulliver’s Travels._

There are several editions of “Gulliver” prepared for schools. It is to
be found in _Everyman’s Library_. The book is, of course, a satirical
essay on man; it is also a masterpiece of fictitious narrative.


 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY (1811-63).

No list of titles is necessary under this name.


 LEOF NICOLAEVICH TOLSTOI. _War and Peace._

Advanced students of French can read the French version of this novel.
A good English version is that by Leo Wiener.


 ANTHONY TROLLOPE (1815-82). _The Warden._ _Barchester Towers._
 _Framley Parsonage._ _Dr. Thorne._ _The Small House at Allington._
 _Last Chronicle of Barset._ (The foregoing six constitute the
 _Chronicles of Barsetshire_.) _Can You Forgive Her?_ _Phineas Finn._
 _Phineas Redux._ _The Prime Minister._ _The Duke’s Children._ _The
 Eustace Diamonds._ (The foregoing six constitute the _Parliamentary
 Novels_.) _Is He Popenjoy?_ _Orley Farm._ _The Vicar of Bullhampton._
 (The last are called the _Manor House Novels_.)

This list, disproportionately long perhaps, seems justifiable because
Trollope wrote an incredible number of novels not all of which are
equally good, and because his books are in the present quarter century
not so widely read as they should be. After Dickens, Thackeray, and
George Eliot, who are the highest peaks in the half century (we cannot
quite measure Meredith and Hardy yet), Anthony Trollope is easily
fourth. And even among the peaks the broad massive plateau of his work
seems more and more to have enduring solidity. Like Balzac in France
(though little like him, book for book), Trollope has written England’s
_comédie humaine_. With him quantity is a quality, for he is a master
in large part by virtue of his bulk; no other novelist seems to have
told so much about the daily life of his nation. The one thing lacking
to make Trollope a very great writer of fiction is that his prose is
not eloquent; though it is good, it has no moments of supreme goodness;
but few other English novelists have sustained such a level of merit
through so many volumes.


 JOHN TOWNSEND TROWBRIDGE. _Neighbor Jackwood._ _Jack Hazard and His
 Fortunes._ _A Chance for Himself._ _Doing His Best._ _Cudjo’s Cave._
 _The Tinkham Brothers’ Tidemill._

No other writer of equal ability has devoted himself to books for boys.


 IVAN SERGYEVICH TURGENIEFF (1818-83). _Fathers and Children._ _Smoke._

Several of Turgenieff’s novels have been translated into English. The
English reader should, if possible, read Russian novels in French.


 ALFRED DE VIGNY (1799-1863). _Cinq-Mars._

This great historical novel is in easy French. It has been published in
an English translation.


 MARY ARNOLD WARD (Mrs. Humphrey Ward). _Robert Elsmere._

An English writer of excellent ideals and deep seriousness, overrated
by Americans who seem to think that she is giving them the “true
inwardness” of British high life.


 ELIZABETH CHERRY WALTZ. _Pa Gladden._

Humorous and touching stories of a Kentucky farmer.


 CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER (1829-1900). _A Little Journey in the World._
 _The Golden House._


 JOHN WATSON (“Ian Maclaren”). _Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush._ _The
 Days of Auld Lang Syne._


 EDWARD NOYES WESTCOTT. _David Harum._

An illustration of the fact that a true humorous character will catch
the fancy of the world, no matter in how defective a plot it is
embodied.


 KATE DOUGLAS WIGGIN (Mrs. Riggs). _The Birds’ Christmas Carol._
 _Penelope’s Progress._ _The Story of Patsy._ _Timothy’s Quest._
 _Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm._


 MARY ELEANOR WILKINS (Mrs. Freeman). _A Humble Romance._ _A New
 England Nun._ _Jane Field._ _Pembroke._ _Jerome, a Poor Man._ _Silence
 and Other Stories._


 OWEN WISTER. _The Virginian._ _Lady Baltimore._


 ISRAEL ZANGWILL. _Children of the Ghetto._ _Dreamers of the Ghetto._




CHAPTER V

THE READING OF POETRY


When Julia Bryant, the daughter of William Cullen Bryant, was a
child, a neighbor of the poet made her first call, and was shown into
the parlor. She found the small Julia seated on the floor with an
illustrated volume of Milton in her lap. She knew, of course, that the
pictures and not the text engaged the child’s attention, but by way of
beginning an acquaintance, she asked:

“Reading poetry already, little girl”?

Julia looked up and regarded her gravely. Then with an air of politely
correcting ignorance, she explained:

“People don’t _read_ poetry. Papas write poetry, and mamas sing poetry,
and little girls learn to say poetry, but nobody reads poetry. That
isn’t what it’s for.”

If the several members of all families were as happily accounted for as
those in Bryant’s household, the Muses would not live so remote from
this world. That mothers sing poetry and little girls say it is enough
to keep it everlastingly alive. The trouble is that few households are
blessed with papas who write poetry; and there are none too many papas
who read it.

If we have not learned to read poetry, let us begin now. Suppose we
read and commit to memory the following stanza, and then talk a little
about it.

    Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
      No hungry generations tread thee down;
    The voice I heard this passing night was heard
      In ancient days by emperor and clown:
    Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
      Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
        She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
          The same that oft-times hath
    Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam
      Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

This is from Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale.” It is one of the most
musical, most magical stanzas in all English poetry; that much anyone
can tell you who has read the poets. But to tell you in what consists
its glory is beyond any critic who is not a poet; nothing of analysis
can add to the effect it is making in your ears, in your brain, now
that you have committed it to memory. One of the best of English
critics--and he was a poet, too--Matthew Arnold, in his essay, “The
Study of Poetry,” made but a dull and wordy discourse when he tried
to tell what the qualities of poetry are. Only by reading the rest of
the poem, and then the rest of Keats, and then other poets, can you
increase for yourself the delight of those wonderful lines. If they do
not tempt you to the great excursion into the poets, you have not read
them over, you have not repeated them aloud often enough. Only for the
sake of dwelling upon these lines, and because we have agreed to talk
about poetry, and not because our comment can reveal the secret, let us
go back and study the stanza.

The nightingale’s song is the voice of immortality. It releases the
individual soul from the present hour, from the struggle of life and
makes it one with the great experiences of the race. The imagination
sweeps over all history on the wings of those first four lines, and
then carries us into the world of religious story, in the lines
recalling the Book of Ruth. And finally we are borne out of the human
world into fairyland. All this in a single stanza!

Every poem of high quality, every one of the treasured passages from
long poems, makes such a magic flight into the realm of eternal ideas,
so that it is commonly said that poetry is “uplifting.” Life and death
and Heaven and the stars are the poet’s subjects. And the poem of
common things, in praise of simple virtues and domestic happiness, such
as have made Burns and Longfellow and Whittier so dear to the heart,
have the same kind of power in less degree; if they do not transport us
to Heaven they reveal the seed of immortality in daily circumstance.

Keats bears the imagination over the world and beyond it in a single
stanza. All poetry of the highest rank has this power to utter eternity
in a few words. And though at first it seems a contradictory thing to
say, it is true that the long poem has the same quality of compression;
it makes long flights of idea in relatively short compass of words.
The time of reading, the time that the physical eye needs to catch
the winged sentences, is nothing. What, you say, “The Faerie Queene,”
“Paradise Lost,” “Hamlet,” the “Iliad,” the “Idylls of the King” are
compressed so that the time it takes to read them is annihilated? Just
that. The complete works of a great poet do not fill more space than
one or two long novels. Poetry is greater than prose if only because
it expresses noble ideas in fewer words; it is language at its highest
power. Its rhymes and rhythms are all a means of conveying this power.
The person who regards poetry as rhymed sentences that might as well be
put into prose, has his eye on the shell of form and has never felt the
inner virtues of poetry. Poetry has its forms because only in its forms
can it say the most.

But what of the great lines of prose that are as eloquent and compact
with thought as any line of poetry? There is only one answer to that.
Such lines of prose are poetry too. “In my Father’s house are many
mansions” is poetry. That it looks like prose on the printed page is
a matter of typesetting, and type is only the outermost husk about
the shell. Hear that sentence from the Bible, think it and feel it,
and you will know that it has high poetic quality. The intensity of
language, the heat of high passion has made the diamond; the diamond
is more beautiful after it is cut, but cutting cannot make a diamond.
The outward form we shall enjoy, but we must look inward for the
essential quality. As our Bible is printed, the following passage from
Ecclesiastes has the appearance of prose, yet it has, too, something
like the stanzaic divisions of poetry.

 Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days
 come not, nor the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say, I have no
 pleasure in them;

 While the sun, or the light, or the moon, or the stars be not
 darkened, nor the clouds return after the rain:

 In the day when the keepers of the house shall tremble, and the strong
 men shall bow themselves, and the grinders cease because they are few,
 and those that look out of the windows be darkened,

 And the doors shall be shut in the streets, when the sound of the
 grinding is low, and he shall rise up at the voice of the bird, and
 all the daughters of music shall be brought low;

 Also when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall
 be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper
 shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his
 long home, and the mourners go about the streets:

 Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or
 the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the
 cistern;

 Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit
 shall return unto God who gave it.

Whatever else this may be, it is poetry of high power. Millions of men
have found in the Bible something which is not in other books, but that
it has in common with other great books the miracle of poetic utterance
every right view of the Bible must admit. The passage we have just
quoted is in beauty equal and not wholly dissimilar to the stanza from
Keats. The Biblical poet has into a few words condensed the tragic
symbols of death and sorrow; and from their dust and dissolution his
soul has aspired upward to the stars.

If the stanza from Keats and the verse from the Bible are both
essentially poetic, what becomes of certain devices of arrangement
which are in Keats and not in the Bible poem, such devices as rhymes
and regularity of accent? These are but instruments of beauty; the
words and their arrangement are the result of the inward passion and
beauty of the thought, and we in reading are acted upon by that result,
and feel again the passion and idea that produced it.

In inferior poetry cause and effect are reversed or fail altogether.
Thousands of poets have tried to make poetry by devices of rhyme and
line division, by deliberately arranging vowels and consonants into
pleasant sounds; almost any conventionally educated person can learn
to do this, just as almost anybody with practice can learn to play a
piece on the piano and carefully obey every sign on the music score.
But no music results, only an empty regularity of sound. Because there
are so many of these mechanical pianists, the sound of the piano seldom
attracts and arrests us. Because so many verses, thousands in the
monthly magazines, have merely the outward form of poetry, thousands
of persons have come to believe that poetry is an artificial trick of
words. The heart of poetry is emotion and a sense of beauty. The great
emotions, patriotism, religion, love, acting upon the poet, turn his
words into magic sequences. When the poetry is finished and arranged
on the printed page, we find, true, that it has a form, that it has
metrical excellences, that its varieties of sound are thus and so; the
poets are masters of at least as many technicalities as the little
versifiers. The test comes when we read the sequence of words cooled,
as it were, into a set form, and touched by their appeal to our inward
sense feel them start into warm life again.

If we go far enough in our reading to study poetry, then we shall
expect to learn about the technical methods and rhetorical elements of
verse; we shall expect to learn about the lives of the poets and about
their growth in their art. Just so the lover of music will wish to
study the laws of sound, even the mechanical and physical properties
of musical instruments, mastering from a scientific point of view the
conditions and materials of the art. Such study helps us to appreciate
great music and great poetry. But it is not necessary. The orchestra
will act upon us without our knowing how it is arranged. The true poem
will act on us if we know nothing more than our own language and our
own feelings. Our pleasant task is to offer ourselves to the great poem
with attention and a desire for pleasure.

Attention and a desire for pleasure are easily distracted in those who
have not the habit of reading poetry. And poetry is often surrounded
by unnecessary distractions. The very zeal of those who would draw our
sympathies to it leads them to stand in the light attempting to explain
what needs no explanation, what, indeed, cannot be explained. The
lecturer upon music too often talks while the orchestra is playing.
After one knows Shakespeare, a discourse on the “lessons of the
tragedies” may enlarge one’s understanding. But such disquisitions are
a forbidding introduction to any poet. We have in America many worthy
persons who lecture on the ethical beliefs of Robert Browning. Of
course any interest, any occasion that will bring in a new “convert,”
and lead him to think of Browning at all, is a gain--the principal
excuse for lectures and criticisms is that they do invite wandering
souls in to meet a poet. But it is usually true that two hours’ reading
in Browning is more delightful and more profitable than a two hours’
lecture about him. And it is often the case that lectures about his
philosophy repel readers who might enjoy his poetry. The lesson of
poetry is beauty; the meaning of poetry is exalted emotions. The
private special beliefs of the poet are of interest, because those
beliefs raised the poet’s intelligence to a white heat, and that heat
left us verse crystals which are beautiful long after the poet’s
beliefs have passed away. Through his beliefs the poet reaches to great
passions that endure, and anyone can understand them without knowing
how the poet arrived at them. If a poet cannot deliver his message,
a critic cannot do it for him. Shelley was a worshiper of democracy;
Shakespeare was a believer in the divinity of kings. Browning was an
optimist. Omar Khayyám, as Edward Fitzgerald rendered him in English
poetry, was a kind of pessimistic fatalist. All this is interesting to
know. But the reader of poetry does not, in the immediate enjoyment of
the poets, vex himself with these diversities of faith. Hear the poets
themselves:

Shakespeare’s unrighteous king, Macbeth, hedged round by his enemies,
dulled in feeling yet still keenly intelligent, hears of the death of
his queen.

        She should have died hereafter;
    There would have been a time for such a word.
    To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
    Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
    To the last syllable of recorded time;
    And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
    The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
    Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
    That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
    And then is heard no more. It is a tale
    Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
    Signifying nothing.

Shelley, the lover of human liberty and the wide freedom of nature,
chants to the West Wind:

    Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is;
    What if my leaves are falling like its own!
    The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

    Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
    Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, spirit fierce,
    My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

    Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
    Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
    And, by the incantation of this verse,

    Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
    Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
    Be through my lips to unawakened earth

    The trumpet of a prophecy! O, wind,
    If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

[Illustration: SHELLEY]

Hear Browning, the athletic optimist:

    The year’s at the spring
    And day’s at the morn;
    Morning’s at seven;
    The hillside’s dew-pearled;
    The lark’s on the wing;
    The snail’s on the thorn:
    God’s in his heaven--
    All’s right with the world!

And of himself, at the close of his life, Browning sings:

    One who never turned his back but marched breast forward,
      Never doubted clouds would break,
    Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph,
      Held we fall to rise, ere baffled to fight better,
                             Sleep to wake.

Finally listen to the beauty-loving pessimist that Fitzgerald brought
out of Persia and set among the jewels in the crown of English poetry:

    So when the Angel of the darker Drink
    At last shall find you by the River-brink,
      And, offering his Cup, invite your Soul
    Forth to your Lips to quaff--you shall not shrink.

    I sent my Soul through the Invisible,
      Some letter of that After-life to spell:
    And after many Days my Soul returned
      And said, “Behold, Myself am Heaven and Hell.”

Here are four poets of different generations and different beliefs;
large volumes have been written to expound each and tell us the
meaning, the philosophy, the development, the tendencies, the influence
of this poet and that. But see them together: no explanation of their
_meanings_ can divide them, for they are all poets, and no group of
men on earth are liker one to another _in purpose_ than great poets
are like to each other. They are all singing the eternal in words of
unmatchable power. They are wondrously alike in their celebration of
beauty and high feelings.

The great poet differs not from other great poets, but from inferior
ones; he differs from his equals mainly in manner of expression. The
new poet is he who brings the old messages in ways that no other poet
has conceived, and the old poet is always new, because he has attained
to beautiful utterance of ideas that we cannot outgrow, which indeed
most of mankind have not yet reached. Prose becomes old-fashioned
(except the Bible, which has a special place in our life and is,
moreover, largely poetic in substance); the prose of Shakespeare’s
time and Milton’s is difficult to read, it seems written in an antique
language. But Shakespeare and Milton are the poetry of to-day and of
uncounted to-morrows.

Not to read poetry is to miss the greatest ideas in the world, to
disregard the noblest and most exalted work that the human mind has
achieved. To poetry all other arts and sciences are in some way
inferior. Not music, nor painting, nor the laws of government, nor the
discoveries of mechanics, nor anything else that man has done has the
right of poetry to be called divine, except only that of which poetry
is the vehicle, which is in a sense one with it, religious prophecy
and worship. Whether religion and poetry are one, as some philosophers
hold, it is a fact of history that the great religious prophets have
had the gifts of poets, and the poets are all singers of hymns and
incantations which stir in our hearts the religious sense. We need
not go further into this question than to this simple truth, that the
man who has no poetry in him is likely to be an irreligious man, not
necessarily lacking in goodness and righteousness, but lacking the
upward aspiration of the truly religious mind.

    Come, poet, come!
    A thousand laborers ply their task,
    And what it tends to scarcely ask,
    And trembling thinkers on the brink
    Shiver and know not how to think.
    To tell the purport of their pain,
    And what our silly joys contain;
    In lasting lineaments portray
    The substance of the shadowy day;
    Our real and inner deeds rehearse,
    And make our meaning clear in verse:
    Come, Poet, come! or but in vain
    We do the work or feel the pain,
    And gather up the seeming gain,
    Unless before the end thou come
    To take, ere they are lost, their sum.

    Come, Poet, come!
    To give an utterance to the dumb,
    And make vain babblers silent, come;
    A thousand dupes point here and there,
    Bewildered by the show and glare;
    And wise men half have learned to doubt
    Whether we are not best without.
    Come, Poet; both but wait to see
    Their error proved to them in thee.

    Come, Poet, come!
    In vain I seem to call. And yet
    Think not the living times forget.
    Ages of heroes fought and fell
    That Homer in the end might tell;
    O’er groveling generations past
    Upstood the Doric fane at last;
    And countless hearts on countless years
    Had wasted thoughts, and hopes, and fears,
    Rude laughter and unmeaning tears,
    Ere England Shakespeare saw, or Rome
    The pure perfection of her dome.
    Others, I doubt not, if not we,
    The issue of our toils shall see;
    Young children gather as their own
    The harvest that the dead had sown,
    The dead forgotten and unknown.

                                   ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH.




CHAPTER VI

THE READING OF POETRY--(_Continued_)


In almost every American household there will be some volume of poetry
through which the young reader can make his entrance into the enchanted
world; there will be a volume of Shakespeare, an old copy of “Paradise
Lost” or the works of Longfellow or Tennyson. In our day a desire to
read is seldom thwarted by lack of books. Indeed, it sometimes seems
as if the very abundance of books made us so familiar with their backs
that we do not value the treasures inside. The biographies of our
grandfathers tell us of walks of five miles to secure some coveted
volume, and a volume so secured was not skimmed or neglected; the
effort to get it made it doubly precious.

If one is left to choose the door through which to enter the realm of
poetry, a good anthology will prove a broad approach. There is none
better than Palgrave’s “Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics.” It is
inexpensive, so that anyone can save enough pennies to buy it. It is
convenient to carry in one’s pocket, a virtue that makes it preferable
to larger anthologies, to those old-fashioned “household collections”
printed in double columns. If all our men and boys had the “Golden
Treasury” in their coat pockets, what a civilization we should have at
the end of ten years! In order to keep up with us the ladies would have
to provide pockets in their dresses or carry more spacious handbags
than the tyranny of style now permits.

The selections in Palgrave or in the four volumes of Ward’s “English
Poets,” are so rich and varied that no reader can fail to find his own
poet, and the next step will be to get a larger selection from that
poet’s works. All the English poets have been published in inexpensive
volumes of selections, many of them in the same _Golden Treasury
Series_; and as poets, like other human beings, are not always at their
best, an edition which contains only the best will save the reader
from the unfortunate experience of meeting a poet for the first time
in his inferior work. When we have learned really to like a poet, we
shall wish to have his complete works, but for the young reader most
modern poets are better for the suppression of their less admirable
passages. Only three or four--Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, our
greatest poets--wrote long poems which to be enjoyed at their fullest
must be read entire. Although it is true that poetry consists of great
lines and that a collection of short poems and passages will be enough
to nourish the soul for its whole earthly life, yet supreme poetry is
built on a mighty plan. Brief lyrics and bits of song are like jewels,
precious, complete, beautiful. Great poems, epics and dramas, are
like cathedrals in which the jewels are set in the walls and in the
windows. One might read all the fine passages from Shakespeare and yet
not feel Shakespeare’s highest, that is, his entire, poetic power.

For the marvelous speeches and songs, however satisfying in themselves,
lose some of their meaning when taken out of the structure of which
they are a part. The stained glass window is beautiful in the artist’s
studio, but when it is set in the church and the light falls through
it, it becomes part of a beauty greater than its own. So, too,
“Macbeth” is greater than Shakespeare’s lyrics, “Paradise Lost” is
greater than all of Milton’s short poems taken together. The true
reader of poetry will pass beyond the delight of the perfect stanza to
the wider joy of the complete drama, the complete epic.

In approaching a long poem, the modern impatient reader is discouraged
sometimes by the number of pages of solid verse which follow those
first pages into which he has plunged. It is well to remember that in
reading poetry, a little traveling of the eye takes the imagination
on long journeys, and that imagination will join for us the first
page and the last even if we have spent six months in making the
intervening journey. “Hamlet” need not be read in a day. If one reads
a few lines at a time one will soon be in the depths of it, and there
is no danger of losing one’s way. We can spend a month in the first
perusal or we can run rapidly through it in the three hours which it
is supposed to occupy on the stage. We can go backward and forward
in it, pause as long as we will on a single speech, or fly swiftly
upon the wings of the action. The sense of leisure, of independence of
hourly circumstance, is one of the spiritual uses of poetry. The poet
and our own nature will determine the time for us. When we follow the
pageant of Shakespeare’s sad histories of the death of kings, we shall
not, I hope, comport ourselves like tourists hurrying through a picture
gallery in order that we may have “done” it before our train goes. We
shall not be so misguided as to plume ourselves when we enter in our
diary: “Read two plays of Shakespeare this week.” Reading that consists
merely in passing the eye over the page is not reading at all. When we
become conscious of turning pages without any inward response, it is
time to lay the book down and do something else. When we are really
reading, we shall not be conscious of the book and we shall not know
how many pages we have read--until we wake up out of dreamland and come
back into our own world.

Two or three plays of Shakespeare are being read every year in every
high school in America. It is a common experience of teachers that
the pupils regard Shakespeare’s plays as the hardest part of the
prescribed reading. One reason is that these dramatic poems are through
a regrettable necessity made the text of lessons in language. The
atmosphere of study and duty surrounding “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
in the classroom takes the charm out of that fairy play. This is not
the fault of the teachers and it is not for us to criticise them; the
wisest leaders in education have not found a way to make the study of
Shakespeare in school less laborious than it is. And many of them think
that it is well that lessons should be hard nuts to crack, that the
young mind is better disciplined if its schoolday tasks are not made
too delightful and easy. Some teachers believe that the old-fashioned
hard digging at books is being in too large a measure replaced by
kindergarten methods, which are so unadvisedly extended that even a
geometry lesson is treated as a game.

For the present we will keep our consideration of the uses and
delights of reading apart from the problems of the schools, and regard
Shakespeare as we regard Scott--a friend to enjoy in leisure hours. I
should advise, then, that pupils who are reading Shakespeare in school
select other plays than those prescribed in class and come to them as
to a novel chosen for pleasure. If the class work requires a study of
“A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” let the young reader try “The Tempest” by
himself. If “Julius Cæsar” is a part of the winter’s school task, let
us in vacation time slip “Macbeth” or “Henry V” into our pockets. And
while our friends in the other hammock are reading a romance of the
hour, let us be reading a romance of the ages. When we are tired of
reading and are ready to play that game of tennis, our opponent, who
has been reading a book that he bought on the newsstand at the railroad
station, will not necessarily beat us, because we know what he does not
know, that a gift of tennis balls comes into the plot of “Henry V.”

The Dauphin of France sends Henry the tennis balls for a mocking gift,
and Henry answers:

    When we have matched our rackets to these balls,
    We will, in France, by God’s grace, play a set
    Shall strike his father’s crown into the hazard.
    Tell him he hath made a match with such a wrangler
    That all the courts of France will be disturbed
    With chaces.

That has a spirit which your friend will not find in the excellent
story of a school game which he has been reading, “How Ralph Saved the
Day.”

The great poems receive us on any good ground of interest which we
choose to tread. Would you have a romantic novel? Shakespeare provides
that in “As You Like It” and “Twelfth Night.” Or a military adventure?
There is “Henry Fifth.” Or a love tragedy? There is “Romeo and Juliet.”
These satisfy our primitive liking for a good story. And so in some
measure do all great poems, for the great poems are epics and dramas,
that is, stories in verse. Literature finds its best structural
material in action and event, and language is best suited to the
expression of actions, perhaps because it has been made by a world of
workers and doers. The most effective means of conveying abstract ideas
is through story. The most moving sections of the Bible are narrative,
the greatest lessons are taught in parables and instances. “Paradise
Lost” is a narrative of great vigor, for all the dull debates and
arguments; and if it was not Milton’s primary intention to tell a great
story for its own sake, nevertheless he did tell a great story and we
can enjoy it for its own sake long before we have begun, and long after
we have ceased, to be interested in his theology and philosophy.

To say that great poets, Homer, Vergil, Dante, Spenser, Shakespeare,
are romancers as truly as are the writers of prose novels is not to
belittle poetry. The highest thoughts can be conveyed in a story. When
a great poetic story-teller ceases for too many lines to be master of
narrative, it will often be found that some other poetic qualities have
for the moment died out of him too. And when he attempts to convey
great ideas with little regard to their place in a moving sequence of
events, he pays the penalty of not being read, he loses hold of the
reader’s interest. The most titanic case of the failure of high poetic
thoughts to win their way to the common heart of man, because of the
disregard of narrative form, is Browning’s “The Ring and the Book.”
There the story, a terrible and touching story, is told over a dozen
times, and not once told well. Imbedded in its strange shapelessness
are wonderful ideas and passages of intense beauty. As a heap of poetry
it is the only production of the Victorian age that has the magnitude
of Shakespeare and the classic epics. Other poems of Browning’s,
“Clive” and “Ivan Ivanovitch,” show that he had narrative gifts. Some
scenes in his dramas are in emotional energy and narrative progression
unrivaled by any poet since Shakespeare. But in “The Ring and the
Book,” into which he put his whole heart, he would not or could not
tell his story as the experience of all ages has shown that stories
must be told: his poem does not move forward in a continuously high and
noble style. And so most of the world of readers are deprived of the
richness with which he freighted from his prodigal mind and great soul
his mighty rudderless ship that goes down in midocean.

Shakespeare told good stories in almost all his plays. He did not
invent the stories, but he selected them from the literature of the
world and from other Elizabethan writers, and then enriched the
narrative with every kind of beauty and significance which it would
hold. On account of their excellence as narratives and their intensely
human and stirring materials, the plays of Shakespeare enjoyed some
measure of popularity even in their own time, if the scholars have
rightly informed us; and the plays have continued to hold the stage
and to interest many of the “great variety of readers” who are
addressed in one of the introductions to the first collected edition
of Shakespeare’s works. In our time the influence of the schools has
insured popular acquaintance with Shakespeare as an object of serious
study. On the other hand, the great increase in the quantity of prose
fiction, and the fact that it is easier to read thin prose than rich
poetry, have obscured for many readers the elementary delight of
Shakespeare’s plays as fictitious romances.

One reason that the inexperienced reader regards the reading of
Shakespeare as an unusual operation of eye and brain is that we are
not accustomed to read the drama of our own time; so that we have not
the habit of following naked dialogue accompanied only by a few terse
stage directions. Since Shakespeare’s time our literature has not been
so rich in drama as in other forms. Some of our plays--those that have
succeeded on the stage and those written in conventional dramatic form
without regard to performance on the stage--are worth reading. But the
public does not encourage the printing of them. Many of our writers
shrewdly make double use of their ideas and turn them both into stage
form and into prose fiction. The large number of dramatized novels and
“novelized” dramas--Shakespeare himself dramatized novels--shows that
in England and America we regard the playbook as something for the
actor to learn and represent to us in spoken word and action. In France
the latest play is for sale in the bookshops like the latest novel.
If our stage is to return to high literary standards, there must grow
up in our public an audience of intelligent playreaders as well as
playgoers. The more intelligently we read plays, the more there will
be worth reading; we can help the stage to attain and hold a better
level of excellence by demanding of it that its productions shall be
“literary,” that is, readable.

That Shakespeare is the single dramatist in our language whom we feel
we ought to read is regrettable. It sets him apart in a solitude which
is as artificial in its way as the attempt of some critics to group
him in a “school of playwrights.” He is solitary in greatness, quite
lonely among his many contemporaries[1] in drama, but the form he used,
narrative dialogue, ought to be as familiar to us as the novel. If ten
people read “The Vicar of Wakefield” to one that reads “She Stoops
to Conquer,” the reason is not that “The Vicar” is better work, but
that the printed play looks strange to the eyes of our reading public.
Plato put his philosophy in dramatic dialogue, apparently with the
intention of choosing a popular and readable form. And the author of
the Shakespearian drama seems to have felt that he had chosen the most
popular and practical vehicle of ideas. Perhaps, if he had known to
what a low condition Puritan prejudice, the social weaknesses of stage
life and other causes were to bring dramatic literature, he might have
turned his narrative genius into other than dramatic form.

That we are not readers of plays is no special fault of this age. A
hundred years ago Charles and Mary Lamb found a wide audience for their
“Tales from Shakespeare.” The publisher announced in the second edition
that the “Tales,” intended primarily for children, had been found “an
acceptable and improving present to young ladies advancing to the
state of womanhood.” If Shakespeare was to be retold for the young, it
was fortunate that Charles Lamb was selected as the emissary from the
land of poetry to those who had never made the great adventure beyond
the confines of prose. Yet it is hard to believe that Lamb’s “Tales”
are necessary to any but lovers of Lamb. There is a danger that the
young reader, for whom he designed the book as a door to Shakespeare,
will linger in the vestibule, content with the genuine riches that
are there, and will not go on to the greater riches of Shakespeare
himself. Shakespeare told the stories better than another can tell
them, and anyone who knows enough of the English language to read
Lamb’s “Tales” will find Shakespeare’s plays intelligible to read, just
as when performed on the stage they are intelligible to the people in
the gallery, even to those in the boxes. Repeated readings with some
reference to simple explanatory notes will make the deep meanings and
fine beauties ever more and more clear.

The plays which a beginner should read are, “A Midsummer Night’s
Dream,” “The Merchant of Venice,” “As You Like It,” “Twelfth Night,”
“The Tempest,” “Henry IV,” “Henry V,” “Richard III,” “Romeo and
Juliet,” “Julius Cæsar,” “Hamlet,” “Othello,” “King Lear,” and
“Macbeth.” The other plays and the poems may, for various reasons, be
reserved for the time when one no longer needs advice about reading.

We shall have gained much of the freedom of soul which is the necessary
condition of reading poetry, if we make a New Year’s resolution not
to be frightened away from the real mysteries of Shakespeare by the
false mysteries of his editors and critics.[2] Shakespeare speaks
our language, but the scholars speak a language which they invented,
as if they intended to hold their authority by wrapping themselves in
impenetrable obscurities which common folk would not try to master.
Let us not be deceived. “The Tempest” was not written for university
professors. Let us open it with the same confident curiosity that we
should bring to “Robinson Crusoe” or “Ivanhoe.”

And after you have read “The Tempest,” what do you remember to have
found difficult? Is it not clearer than daylight, that enchanted
island where Prospero, the exiled duke, has lived twelve years with
his daughter Miranda? Is it not a simple and sweet romance that Prince
Ferdinand should be wrecked on the island and should fall in love with
Miranda and that she should fall in love with him, the first man she
has seen except her father? Is it not clear that Prospero, a student
of magic, has gained control of the spirits of the island and has
his blithe servant, Ariel, and his brutal servant, Caliban? Did you
find any difficulty in understanding that when the wicked brother,
who cheated Prospero of his dukedom, is cast ashore upon the island,
Prospero pardons him and gets his dukedom back? What is obscure in this
wonder tale? “Cinderella” and “The Sleeping Beauty” are made of the
same stuff, and we hear them at our mothers’ knees before we are able
to read at all.

But there is more in “The Tempest” than a childish fairy tale. Yes,
much more, but that more is insinuated into the story, it is
embroidered upon it, it comes to us without effort of ours, for the
poet is a Prospero and teaches us, as Prospero taught Miranda, by
art and nature and not by laborious counsel. You will feel as you
follow the fairy story that the spirit of nature has stolen over you
unawares, that Caliban represents the evil in the natural world and
Ariel the good, and that both are obedient to the bidding of man’s
intelligence. So much philosophy will come to you of itself; it is not
a dull lesson to knit your brows over; you need seek no lecturer to
expound it to you. A song of Ariel will linger in your ear. All that
is required of you is that your senses be wide awake and that your
fancy be free from bookish anxiety and ready to be played upon. The
miracle will be wrought for you. You need only sit, like Ferdinand, and
watch the masque which the wizard evokes--“a most majestic vision, and
harmoniously charming.” There will remain with you some speech, grave
with philosophy and luminous with imagery, such as this:

                  These our actors,
    As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
    Are melted into air, into thin air;
    And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
    The cloud capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
    The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
    Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
    And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
    Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
    As dreams are made on; and our little life
    Is rounded with a sleep.

[Illustration: TENNYSON]

It is better, perhaps, to read the comedies and histories before the
tragedies. The comedies and histories are simpler in motive, and
through lighter thoughts give one the feeling for Shakespeare’s diction
and prepare one to enter the tragedies that treat of higher matters. It
is because tragedy is concerned with greater ideas, not because it ends
unhappily, that it is greater poetry than comedy. It deals with more
important motives and more serious events, and its thought is complete;
the career of Hamlet, or of Macbeth, is finished, and the ideas of life
that informed the career and shaped the events are carried out to their
fullest. Tragedy does not consist in the piling up of corpses in the
last act; the end of the characters is nothing in itself. Shakespeare
always rounds off the conclusion with rapid strokes; having done with
the ideas and motives that lead to the end he has little interest in
the mere death of his characters. It is the “way to dusty death” that
interests him and us and makes the tragedy profound. To those readers
referred to in a previous chapter, who do not like sad endings, we can
now give another answer. They put too much thought upon the ending and
too little upon the story that leads to the end. Whoever does not like
tragedy does not like serious ideas, and whoever does not read tragedy
does not read the greatest poetry. For the greatest poetry must consist
of the most important ideas. Not only upon beauty of form and magic of
phrase, but on the heart, the content, depends the greatness of a poem.



LIST OF BOOKS OF POETRY

(_Supplementary to Chapter VI_)


COLLECTIONS AND ANTHOLOGIES OF POETRY

 _The English Poets_, edited by T. H. WARD, and published by Macmillan,
 in four volumes, at $1 each.

On the whole, the most satisfactory collection of English poetry.
Each of the chief poets is represented by several selections, and the
introductory criticisms are in themselves a liberal education.


 _Little Masterpieces of Poetry_, edited by HENRY VAN DYKE, in six
 volumes, and published by Doubleday, Page & Co.

The poems are divided according to form; one volume containing ballads;
another, odes and sonnets; another, lyrics; and so on. This is a
rational, but not a practical, principle of division, for it is better
to have the selections, say, from Keats, together in one’s anthology
than to have his sonnets in one volume and his lyrics in another. A
poet and his poetry are very definite units, but the lines between
lyrics and ballads and odes are not sharp and, on the whole, not
important.


 _Lyra Heroica_, edited by WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY, and published by
 Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Called “a book of verse for boys”; really a book of verse for
everybody, consisting of the martial, the heroic, the patriotic, from
the old English ballads to Rudyard Kipling.


 _A Victorian Anthology_, edited by EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN, and
 published by Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

A remarkably adequate collection of English poems of the last seventy
years.


 _An American Anthology_, edited by EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN, and
 published by Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

Not only a wise selection of the best American poetry, but a complete
survey of the poetic utterance of this country, from a biographical and
historical point of view.


 _The Golden Treasury_, edited by FRANCIS TURNER PALGRAVE, and
 published by Macmillan (see page 109 of this Guide).


 _The Golden Treasury_, second series, edited by FRANCIS TURNER
 PALGRAVE.

This continues the first _Golden Treasury_ and includes the Victorian
poets. It is not so complete as Stedman’s _Anthology_, but costs only
half as much.


 _The Children’s Treasury of Lyrical Poetry_, edited by FRANCIS TURNER
 PALGRAVE.


 _The Children’s Garland from the Best Poets_, edited by COVENTRY
 PATMORE.

The two foregoing are in the _Golden Treasury Series_, and published by
Macmillan.


 _Elizabethan Lyrics_, edited by FELIX E. SCHELLING.

An inexpensive collection, published by Ginn & Co., covering the same
period as is covered by about one sixth of the _Golden Treasury_, but
in larger type and so pleasanter to read.


 _Seventeenth Century Lyrics_, edited by FELIX E. SCHELLING.

Continues the volume mentioned above.


 _The Blue Poetry Book_, edited by ANDREW LANG.

A good collection of verse intended by the editor for young people, and
selected by him wisely, but quite whimsically, from poets he happens to
like.


 _Golden Numbers_, edited by KATE DOUGLAS WIGGIN AND NORA ARCHIBALD
 SMITH.

An excellent anthology intended for youth.


 _Oxford Book of English Verse_, edited by ARTHUR T. QUILLER-COUCH.

A handsome book which represents, in less degree than most anthologies,
the traditional standards of excellence or traditionally excellent
poets, and in rather greater degree the fine taste of the editor for
the best.


 _English and Scottish Popular Ballads_, edited by FRANCIS JAMES CHILD.

This is a selection in a single volume from the great edition of the
ballads by Professor Child. It is equally for the student and the
reader. In the _Cambridge Poets_, published by Houghton, Mifflin & Co.


 _Specimens of English Dramatic Poets_, edited by CHARLES LAMB.

Passages that pleased Lamb in the works of Shakespeare’s
contemporaries. Interesting to a reader of Elizabethan drama and to a
reader of Lamb.


INDIVIDUAL POETS


 ÆSCHYLUS (525-456 B.C.). _Lyrical Dramas._ In _Everyman’s Library_.


 THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH (1836-1907). _Poems._

Household Edition. Aldrich was a careful editor of his own work and
this volume is complete in its inclusions and its omissions. It is one
of the few volumes of American poetry worth owning.


 ARISTOPHANES (about 450-380 B.C.). _Comedies._

In two volumes of _Bohn’s Library_, translated by W. J. Hickie.


 MATTHEW ARNOLD (1822-88). _Poetical Works._

The Globe Edition, published by Macmillan, which costs $1.75, is the
best. Most of the chief British poets can be had in this edition.
The Cambridge Edition, published by Houghton, Mifflin & Co., costs a
little more the volume, but it is preferable on the whole in point of
manufacture and readability. The young reader of Arnold may begin with
the narrative poem, “Sohrab and Rustum.”


 FRANCIS BEAUMONT (158?-1616). _Dramatic Works._

The best selection of the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher is the two
volumes, edited by J. St. Loe Strachey in the _Mermaid Series_,
published by Charles Scribner’s Sons. In this series are, in the words
of the title page, “The Best Plays of the Old Dramatists.” A taste
for Elizabethan drama is as well left undeveloped until after a fair
acquaintance has been formed with the plays of Shakespeare.


 WILLIAM BLAKE (1757-1827). _Songs of Innocence._ _Songs of Experience._

There are several collections of Blake’s lyrics in single-volume
editions. A good one is that with an introductory essay by Lawrence
Housman. Blake’s lyrics of children and his “Tiger, Tiger, Burning
Bright” will be found in many of the anthologies.


 THOMAS EDWARD BROWN (1830-97). _Collected Poems._

A remarkable English poet, but little known to the general public until
the posthumous publication of his work in 1900 by Macmillan & Co., in
the single-volume Globe Edition, which contains the works of Shelley,
Tennyson, and other great poets; Brown is worthy of that distinguished
company.


 ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING (1809-61). _Poetical Works._

In one volume, in Macmillan’s Globe Edition. “The Sonnets from the
Portuguese” are to be found in a small volume by themselves. They are
the best of Mrs. Browning’s work. The new reader of Mrs. Browning
should begin after page 150 in the Macmillan edition and read only the
shorter poems.


 ROBERT BROWNING (1812-89). _Complete Poetic and Dramatic Works._

The Cambridge Edition is the best, in one volume. The Globe Edition is
in two volumes. The two volumes in _Everyman’s Library_ contain all of
Browning’s poems written up to 1864. A good volume for the young reader
is “The Boys’ Browning,” which contains poems of action and incident.
An inexpensive volume, published by Smith, Elder & Co., called “The
Brownings for the Young,” contains a good variety of Browning, with
some selections from Mrs. Browning.


 WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT (1794-1878). _Poetical Works._

The poems of Bryant are published in one volume by D. Appleton & Co.
Bryant’s translations of the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey” are better than
most poetic versions of Homer in simplicity and dignity. The young
reader cannot do better than to meet Homer in Bryant before he learns
Greek enough to meet Homer himself.


 ROBERT BURNS (1759-96). _Poems, Songs, and Letters._

The complete work of Burns in the Globe Edition (Macmillan).


 GEORGE GORDON NOEL BYRON (1788-1824). _Poetry of Byron._

A selection by Matthew Arnold in the _Golden Treasury Series_.


 CHARLES STUART CALVERLEY (1831-84). _Fly Leaves._

A taste for refined parody indicates the possession of a critical
sense. Coarse parody which implies no intimate knowledge of the poet
parodied is not worth while. The reader who appreciates Calverley’s
delicious verses will have learned to appreciate the serious modern
poets. Other writers of humorous verse, including parodies which are
delicate and witty, are J. K. Stephen, Mr. Owen Seaman, Henry Cuyler
Bunner.


 THOMAS CAMPBELL (1777-1844).

Enough of Campbell will be found in Ward’s Poets.


 GEORGE CHAPMAN (1559-1634). _Dramas._

One volume in the _Mermaid Series_. (See pages 243-8 of this Guide.)


 GEOFFREY CHAUCER (1340-1400). _Canterbury Tales._

A volume in _Everyman’s Library_ contains eighteen of the tales,
slightly simplified in spelling and vocabulary, said to be the first
successful attempt to modernize Chaucer, for the benefit of the
ordinary reader, without destroying the essential quality of the
original. But with the glossary and notes found in “The Student’s
Chaucer,” edited by W. W. Skeat, the lover of poetry will find himself
able to read Chaucer in the original form without great difficulty.


 ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH (1819-61). _Poems._

In the _Golden Treasury Series_. Readers of poetry who have not met
Clough have an entirely new poetical experience before them in “The
Bothie,” a narrative poem. It should be tried after Longfellow’s
“Miles Standish” and “Evangeline.” Clough was not among the greatest
Victorian poets, but there is room for him in an age like ours which is
said, whether justly or not, to be lacking in poetic voices. In this
connection readers may turn to Clough’s poem, “Come, Poet Come!” (see
page 107 of this Guide).


 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE (1772-1834). _Poetical Works._

In the Globe Edition. The single volume in _Everyman’s Library_ is
adequate.


 WILLIAM COWPER (1731-1800). _Poetical Works._

In the Globe Edition.


 DANTE ALIGHIERI (1265-1321). _Divina Commedia._

Cary’s translation is in _Everyman’s Library_. The best way on the
whole for English readers to learn their Dante is through Charles
Eliot Norton’s prose translation (see page 210 of this Guide).


THOMAS DEKKER (157?-163?). _Dramas._

In the _Mermaid Series_.


JOHN DONNE (1573-1631). _Poems._

In the _Muses Library_ (Charles Scribner’s Sons). A wonderful poet,
who, perhaps, is not to be read until one’s taste for poetry has grown
certain, but a liking for whom in mature years is an almost infallible
proof of true poetic appreciation.


JOHN DRYDEN (1631-1700). _Poetical Works._

In the Globe Edition and also in the Cambridge Edition. The reader
should first read Dryden’s odes and lyrical pieces; his satires may be
deferred.


 GEORGE ELIOT (Mary Ann Evans, 1819-80). _Poems._

In one volume, published by Doubleday, Page & Co., and to be found in
any complete edition of her works. Her reputation as a novelist has
overshadowed her excellence as a poet. “The Choir Invisible” is one of
the noble poems of the century.


RALPH WALDO EMERSON (1803-82). _Poems._

In one volume, published by Houghton, Mifflin & Co. Emerson is the most
exalted spirit of our literature, and his poems condense and refine the
best ideas to be found in his prose.


EURIPIDES (480-406 B.C.). _Dramas._

In two volumes in _Everyman’s Library_.


_Everyman and Other Miracle Plays._

In _Everyman’s Library_. See also “Specimens of Pre-Shakespearean
Drama,” edited by J. M. Manly (Ginn & Co.). The recent stage production
of “Everyman” has created a new popular interest in very early
English dramas. The value of most of them is historical rather than
intrinsically poetic.


EUGENE FIELD. _A Little Book of Western Verse._

Contains the familiar poems for and about children.


EDWARD FITZGERALD (1809-83). _Translation of the Rubáiyát of Omar
Khayyám._

There are innumerable editions of this famous poem. An inexpensive one
is published by Houghton, Mifflin & Co.


JOHN FLETCHER (1579-1625). _Dramas._

With Beaumont in the _Mermaid Series_.


 JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE (1749-1832). _Dramatic and Poetic Works._

The dramas, translated by Walter Scott and others, are in _Bohn’s
Library_. American readers will be interested in Bayard Taylor’s poetic
version of “Faust.”


 OLIVER GOLDSMITH (1728-74). _Poems, etc._

Goldsmith’s few poems are to be found in a good edition of his works in
one volume, published by Crowell & Co.


 THOMAS GRAY (1716-71). _Poetical Works._

In one volume, in the Aldine Edition (Macmillan). Readers of the
familiar “Elegy in a Country Churchyard” need only to be told that a
half dozen of Gray’s other poems are equally fine; and they should not
overlook the delightful “Ode on the Death of Mr. Walpole’s Cat.”


 KATE GREENAWAY. _Marigold Garden._ _Under the Window._

Miss Greenaway’s delightful pictures of children would entitle her to a
place among the poets, even if she had not done the little rhymes that
go with her drawings.


 FRANCIS BRET HARTE (1839-1902). _Poetical Works._

In one volume, published by Houghton, Mifflin & Co.


 HEINRICH HEINE (1797-1856). _Poems._

Heine’s lyrics have tempted the talents of many translators. The finest
collection of verses from Heine in English is that by Emma Lazarus,
herself a true poet.


 WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY. _Poems._

Henley’s one volume of poems, a slender volume, published by Scribner,
places him high among the secondary poets of nineteenth century England.


 GEORGE HERBERT (1593-1633). _Poems._

Herbert’s poems with his “Life” by Izaak Walton, are published by
Walter Scott, in one volume in the _Canterbury Poets_, and also, in a
single volume, by Crowell & Co. Herbert is the finest of the religious
lyric poets of the seventeenth century.


 ROBERT HERRICK (1591-1674). _Poems._

A fine selection, with an introduction by Thomas Bailey Aldrich, is
published in one volume by the Century Co. Herrick is to be found also
in the _Canterbury Poets_, in one volume, and in _Morley’s Universal
Library_, published by George Rutledge & Sons.


 THOMAS HEYWOOD (158?-164?). _Dramatic Works._

In the _Mermaid Series_.


 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES (1809-94). _Complete Poetical Works._

In the Cambridge Edition.


 HOMER. _The Iliad._ _The Odyssey._

See pages 211-12 of this Guide.


 THOMAS HOOD (1799-1845). _Poems._

Hood’s humorous poems are found in a pleasantly illustrated volume,
published by Macmillan. His serious poems, “Eugene Aram,” “The Bridge
of Sighs,” “The Song of the Shirt,” are well known, and are in many
anthologies.


 HORACE. _Odes, Epodes, Satires, and Epistles._

Selected translations from the best English poets and scholars in one
volume of the _Chandos Classics_, published by Frederick Warne & Co.

[Illustration: LONGFELLOW]


 BEN JONSON (1573-1637). _Plays._

In the _Mermaid Series_. Jonson’s fine lyrics, including the perfect
song “Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes,” should be looked for in the
anthologies.


 JOHN KEATS (1795-1821). _Poems._

The best edition of Keats is that edited by Buxton Forman. Good
editions are those in _Everyman’s Library_ and in the _Golden Treasury
Series_.


 RUDYARD KIPLING. _Barrack-Room Ballads._ _The Seven Seas._


 SIDNEY LANIER (1842-81). _Poems._

In one volume, published by Scribner. An inspired poet, if ever one was
born in America.


 WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR (1775-1864). _Poems, Imaginary Conversations,
 etc._

A volume of selections from the prose and verse of Landor is to be
found in the _Golden Treasury Series_.


 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW (1807-82). _Complete Poetical Works._

In the Cambridge Edition. A good selection from Longfellow appears in
the _Golden Treasury Series_.


 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL (1819-91). _Complete Poetical Works._

In the Cambridge Edition.


 MAURICE MAETERLINCK. _Plays._

Translated by Richard Hovey.


 CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE (1564-93). _Plays._

In the _Mermaid Series_.


 GEORGE MEREDITH (1828-1909). _Poems._

Published in one volume by Scribner. Meredith’s poems of nature should
be read first.


 JOHN MILTON (1608-74). _Complete Poetical Works._

In the Cambridge Edition and also in the Globe Edition. There are many
texts of Milton prepared for use in schools. The young reader will be
fortunate if he can read and enjoy the shorter poems and two or three
books of “Paradise Lost,” before he comes to the study of them in
school.


 MOLIÈRE (Jean Baptiste Poquelin, 1622-73). _Dramatic Works._

There are many English versions of Molière, some prepared for the
stage. The edition in three volumes in _Bohn’s Library_ is practically
complete.


 THOMAS MOORE (1779-1852). _Irish Melodies._

The complete poems of Moore are published in an inexpensive volume by
T. Y. Crowell & Co. Moore’s songs are his best work and many of them
retain a sure place in the popular balladry of our race.


 WILLIAM MORRIS (1834-96). _The Defence of Guinevere._ _Life and Death
 of Jason._

The great fluency of Morris’s poetry makes his longer narratives
remarkably easy to read. Although he is a poet known and cherished by
the few, his stories in verse are singularly well adapted to young
readers.


 EDGAR ALLAN POE (1809-49). _Complete Poetical Works._

The best edition is that edited by Stedman and Woodberry. There are
several other single-volume editions. The dozen best poems of Poe
should be known to every young American, and Mr. Andrew Lang is right
in saying (preface to the “Blue Poetry Book”) that the youngest ear
will be delighted by the beauty of the words.


 ALEXANDER POPE (1688-1744). _Complete Poetical Works._

In the Cambridge Edition. A century that began with Keats and Shelley
and ended with Swinburne and Meredith does not accord Pope the high
place he enjoyed in his own century, but places him at best among the
most brilliant of the comic poets. The “Rape of the Lock” is a humorous
masterpiece. A surprisingly good anthology of Pope is the section
given to him in Bartlett’s “Familiar Quotations”; the large number
of lines from his work is sure proof of his place in our literature;
only Shakespeare, Milton, and the Bible contribute so much that is
“familiar.”


 JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY. _Old-Fashioned Roses._

A natural and joyous singer about common things, deservedly popular in
America and a truer poet than many critics suspect.


 CHRISTINA GEORGINA ROSSETTI (1830-94). _Poems._

Published in one volume by Little, Brown & Co. Among English women only
Mrs. Browning is so fine a poet as Christina Rossetti.


 DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI (1828-82). _Complete Poetical Works._

In two volumes, published by Little, Brown & Co. The young reader
should begin with Rossetti’s songs, ballads, and simpler poems, “The
Blessed Damosel” and “My Sister’s Sleep.” The sonnet sequence, “The
House of Life,” is for mature readers.


 JOHANN CHRISTOPH FRIEDRICH VON SCHILLER (1759-1805). _Dramatic Works
 and Poems._

In several volumes of _Bohn’s Library_, translated by Coleridge and
others.


 WALTER SCOTT (1771-1832). _Complete Poetical Works._

In the Cambridge Edition. Scott’s narrative poems are preëminently
adapted to the taste and understanding of young readers. There are many
school editions of Scott’s poetry, and innumerable reprints attest his
continued popularity.


 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.

The best one-volume edition of Shakespeare is the Cambridge Edition.
The best edition in many volumes is the Cambridge Shakespeare,
published by Macmillan & Co. It gives the readings of the Elizabethan
texts so that the reader can distinguish (and accept or reject)
the emendations of scholars. A pocket edition such as the Temple
(Macmillan), or the Ariel (Putnam), will prove a good friend.


 PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY (1792-1822). _Complete Poetical Works._

In the Cambridge Edition or the Globe. In two volumes in _Everyman’s
Library_. Selected poems in the _Golden Treasury Series_.


 PHILIP SIDNEY (1554-86). _Lyric Poems._

In a small attractive volume, published by Macmillan.


 SOPHOCLES (495-406 B.C.) _Plays._

In the English translation of R. C. Jebb. The volume in _Everyman’s
Library_ contains translations by Young. Professor G. H. Palmer’s
“Antigone” is as remarkable as his “Odyssey.”


 ROBERT SOUTHEY (1774-1843). _Poems._

Selected poems in the _Golden Treasury Series_.


 EDMUND SPENSER (1552-99). _Complete Poems._

In the Globe Edition. Called the poet’s poet; a source of inspiration
to other poets. If we do not read “The Faerie Queene” at length, it is
because we have so many poets since Spenser. Yet if the reader had only
Spenser he would have an inexhaustible river of English poetry.


 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON (1849-94). _A Child’s Garden of Verses._

Published by Scribner, in one volume, which contains Stevenson’s
other verse. “The Child’s Garden” celebrates childhood in a way that
touches the grown imagination, like the poems about children by Blake,
Swinburne, and Francis Thompson, but it appeals also to children of all
ages.


 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE (1837-1909). _Selected Poems._

Edited by R. H. Stoddard and published by Crowell. The young reader
should approach Swinburne first in “Atalanta,” poems about children,
poems about other poets, and poems of liberty, notably “The Litany of
Nations.” He is a noble poet, frequently misrepresented by friendly and
unfriendly wafters of current literary opinion.


 JOHN B. TABB. _Poems._

In two or three small volumes, published by Small, Maynard & Co. The
purest note among living American poets.


 ALFRED TENNYSON (1809-92). _Poetic and Dramatic Works._

Complete in one volume in the Cambridge Edition and also in the Globe.

Of all modern poets preëminently the one for young and old readers to
know entire (with the possible exception of his dramas).


 THEOCRITUS. _Idylls._

In English prose, together with translations from Bion and Moschus, by
Andrew Lang, in the _Golden Treasury Series_. Theocritus is translated
into excellent English verse by the poet, C. S. Calverley.


 JAMES THOMSON (1700-48). _The Castle of Indolence._ _The Seasons._

Dimmed but not displaced by later poets of nature. Thomson may be read
first in the anthologies, from which now and again a sincere admirer
will be sent to his complete works.


 JAMES THOMSON (1834-82). _The City of Dreadful Night._

A remarkable poet, easily among those whom we think of as next to the
greatest poets. Professor William James calls “The City of Dreadful
Night” “that pathetic book,” “which I think is less well known than it
should be for its literary beauty, simply because men are afraid to
quote its words--they are so gloomy, and at the same time so sincere.”


 FRANCIS THOMPSON (1859-1907). _The Hound of Heaven._

This poet, lately dead, has surely taken his place among the true
voices of English poetry.


 HENRY VAUGHAN (1622-95). _Poems._

In the Aldine Edition (Macmillan).


 VERGIL (70-19 B.C.). _Eclogues._ _Georgics._ _Æneid._

In Conington’s prose translation. The poetic version of William Morris
is spirited and fluent.


 JOHN WEBSTER (lived in the Elizabethan age). _Dramas._

In the _Mermaid Series_.


 WALT WHITMAN (1819-92). _Leaves of Grass._

Whitman’s poetry is complete in one volume, published by Small, Maynard
& Co. The most powerful of American poets. The young reader should
begin with the patriotic pieces and the poems of nature in the sections
entitled “Sea-Drift,” “By the Roadside,” “Drum Taps,” “Memories of
President Lincoln,” “Whispers of Heavenly Death.”


 JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER (1807-92). _Complete Poetical Works._

In the Cambridge Edition. Widely loved in America for his popular
ballads and songs of common things. In his poems of liberty and in
poems of religious sympathy and faith, the true passion of the poet
overcomes the technical limitations of his verse and results in pure
poetry.


 WILLIAM WORDSWORTH (1770-1850). _Complete Poetical Works._

In the Globe Edition. The true Wordsworthian believes with Robert
Southey that “a greater poet than Wordsworth there never has been
nor ever will be.” A serene voice that swelled increasingly through
a troubled century, and is more and more felt to have uttered the
essential ideas needed in these hundred years. Yet much of Wordsworth
is less than poetic, and the new reader should seek him first in the
selections edited by Matthew Arnold in the _Golden Treasury Series_.

[Illustration: WORDSWORTH]


FOOTNOTES:

[1] See page 56.

[2] See pages 251-4.




CHAPTER VII

THE READING OF HISTORY


The plays of Shakespeare which are based upon the chronicles of
English kings are grouped in the Folio edition of the dramatic works
as “Histories.” It will not surprise any reader, who happens not to
have thought of it before, to learn that the episodes in “Henry IV” and
“Henry V” do not follow the actual course of events in the reigns of
the real kings; we take it for granted that Shakespeare meant to write
historical fiction, and we read the plays as creations of the poetic
imagination. But many readers will be surprised to hear that most works
which we call historic are likewise figments of the imagination, and
that we should read many of them in somewhat the same spirit as we
read the historical plays of Shakespeare or good historical novels.
Not only do we get the most pleasure out of the great historians by
regarding their works as pieces of artistic writing, but we save
ourselves from the error of accepting their narratives as fact. For
it is generally true that the more glowing, the more imaginative, the
more architectural a work of history, the more it is open to suspicion
that it is not an exact account of true events. In taking this
position we are not appropriating to the uses of literary enjoyment
works of information that should be left among the dictionaries and
encyclopedias; we are only obeying the best critical historians, who
warn us not to believe the accepted masterpieces of history, but allow
us to enjoy them. And enjoyment is what we seek and value.

The conception of history as the work of the imagination was held by
all the older historians. Bacon said that poetry is “feigned history.”
That is, he conceived that the methods of poetry and history are the
same and that the difference lies in the material, the poet inventing
the substance of his story, the historian finding his substance in the
recorded events of the past. This view of history obtained up to the
nineteenth century. Macaulay said that history is a compound of poetry
and philosophy. And Carlyle thought it proper to designate as a history
his “French Revolution,” a work based on certain facts in history but
consisting in large part of dramatic fiction, philosophic reflection,
and political argument. In the last hundred years there has grown up a
view of history as a science, the purpose of which is to examine the
evidences of the past in human life as the geologist studies the past
of the physical globe on which we live. The new school of history is
comparatively so young that it has not produced many writers of high
rank in eloquence and literary power, whereas poetic history is as
old as literature and includes the work of many great masters. These
masters live by their eloquence; for it is eloquence rather than mere
truth to fact that gives a work a permanent place in literature. So
our knowledge of historic events must come to us, the world of general
readers, in large part from historians who were great artists rather
than accurate scholars. And scientific history, and also scientific
biography, will for another century be a voice crying in the beautiful
wilderness of legend, myth, philosophical opinion, political prejudice,
and patriotic enthusiasm.

We can cheerfully leave this scientific history where it belongs,
in the hands of historians and special students. The better for us
as readers if we can read the great histories with the same delight
and somewhat the same kind of interest that we bring to the reading
of romances. There will be enough truth in them to give us a fairly
just view of former ages. The culture and humanity will be there.
Shakespeare’s stories of English kings give us the spirit of England.
Carlyle’s “French Revolution” will never cease to be a splendid work
of art. Bancroft’s “History of the United States” will remain a noble
celebration of democracy, even though he was not strict in his use of
documents.

In school we expect to learn true lessons in history, to get our dates
right and keep our judgments impartial. Out of school we shall read
history for pleasure and like it the better if it is informed with the
eloquence, the prejudice, the philosophy, in short the personality of a
great writer.

There are certain books that occur immediately as introductions to
the various departments of literature. We agreed that Palgrave’s
“Golden Treasury” is the best book to put into the hands of one
knocking for the first time at the door of poetry. Boswell’s “Life of
Johnson” is a perfect biography to win the new reader’s liking for
biographical literature and memoirs. And so there is one volume of
history that seems the best of all books in which English-speaking
youth may read the great story of the race, Green’s “Short History of
the English People.” One might wish from patriotic motives that there
were an American history equally good, but there is none, so far as I
know--none which covers our national life as a whole. We can, however,
be content with Green, for the American cannot know his own history or
his own literature and traditions without knowing those of England. Our
literature is English literature and must be for centuries to come,
and in most of our reading of poetry and fiction we shall find that
the history of England is involved more deeply than the history of our
country.

The merits of Green’s History, the literary merits, are its clear
arrangements, the fine lucidity of the writing, its condensation
of national movements into rich chapters where, as from a peak one
overlooks the great epochs of disaster and progress. These are the
opening sentences:

“For the fatherland of the English race we must look far away from
England itself. In the fifth century after the birth of Christ, the
one country which we know to have borne the name of Angeln or the
Engleland lay in the district which we now call Sleswick, a district
in the heart of the peninsula which parts the Baltic from the northern
seas. Its pleasant pastures, its black-timbered homesteads, its prim
little townships, looking down on inlets of purple water, were then but
a wild waste of heather and sand, girt along the coast with sunless
woodland, broken here and there by meadows which crept down to the
marshes and the sea.”

Could any historic novel, we may say could any _other_ historic
romance, open more enticingly? Here is rich promise, promise of
the picturesque, promise of the eloquent phrase, promise of a
sympathetic history of a people who are delvers in the soil, dwellers
in homesteads, and no mere pawns in the game of kings. This is to
be a history of a people. We shall learn of their great common
characteristics; we shall understand them as we understand a family,
and every adventure from King Alfred’s burning of the cakes to Clive’s
conquest of India will spring like the episodes in a great plot from
the character of the English race.

From Green’s History, as a whole, we shall learn what are the
important things in the history of any people. His admirable sense
of the relative values of events and persons informs his work with a
philosophy of life that is just, wholesome, and salutary for a young
person to be imbued with who must look out on the daily struggle about
him, read the endless hodge-podge of newspaper chronicle, and weigh
the day’s events wisely. Green fulfils the ideal which he sets forth
in the preface: “It is the reproach of historians that they have too
often turned history into a mere record of the butchery of men by their
fellow men. But war plays a small part in the real history of European
nations, and in that of England its part is smaller than in any....
If I have said little of the glories of Cressy, it is because I have
dwelt much on the wrong and misery which prompted the verse of Longland
and the preaching of Ball. But on the other hand, I have never shrunk
from telling at length of the triumphs of peace. I have restored to
their place among the achievements of Englishmen the ‘Faerie Queene’
and the ‘Novum Organum.’ I have set Shakespeare among the heroes of
the Elizabethan age.... I have had to find a place for figures little
heeded in common history--the figures of the missionary, the poet, the
printer, the merchant, the philosopher.”

One of the practical merits of Green’s England as an introduction to
the reading of historic literature is that at the head of each chapter
he gives the works from which he has drawn. And as his nature and
ideals of history led him to the most fertile and interesting of other
historians, his lists contain the titles of readable books rather than
dry and obscure sources. So that if a reader finds one part of the
story of England especially fascinating he can turn aside to those
historians who have treated it more fully, to the authorities whom
Green read and enjoyed. For instance, see the wealth of books which
Green mentions at the head of the chapter that most concerns us, The
Independence of America. There are Lord Stanhope’s “History of England
from the Peace of Utrecht,” Bancroft’s “History of the United States,”
Massey’s “History of England from the Accession of George the Third,”
Lecky’s “History of England in the Eighteenth Century”; the letters
and memoirs of individuals who witnessed the struggle, or took part
in it, such as the “Letters” of Junius, “Life and Correspondence of
Charles James Fox,” Burke’s speeches and pamphlets. And we should add
the newest important authority on the conflict, Trevelyan’s “American
Revolution.”

These books in turn will lead to others as far as the reader cares
to go. Indeed it is one of the delights and excitements of reading
that one book suggests another, and the eager reader, who is under no
obligation to go along a definite course, finds himself in a glorious
tangle of bypaths. A book like Green’s may lead into any corner of
literature; one may follow, as it were, over the intellectual ground
where he got his education. We may begin with Gibbon’s “Rome” which
he read at sixteen (other boys of sixteen can read it with as much
pleasure as he found in it, even if they do not become historians),
and we can go on through his early studies of the English church. If
one reads only the poets and men of letters to whom he gives a place
in his chronicle of English life one will be, before one knows it, a
cultivated man--even a learned man.

Let us dwell a moment on this aspect of leadership in books. No two
persons will ever follow the same course of reading; no list will
prove good for everybody; but any book which has interested you, and
which you have reason to think the product of a great mind, will
constitute itself a guide to reading;[3] it will throw out a hundred
clues, far-leading and profitable to take up, clues which show what
has been the reading of the author whose work suggests them. And there
must always be safety in following where a great man has gone in his
literary pilgrimages.

If there is no history of America comparable in scope and style to
Green’s “Short History of the English People,” there are several
American historians of high rank. Perhaps because they were endowed
with dramatic imagination, or were influenced by the literary rather
than the scientific masterpieces of history, American historians of
genius have applied their talents to romantic periods in the story of
foreign nations, or to those early navigations and settlements which
resulted in the founding of our nation. Washington Irving began in
his “Life of Columbus” and “The Conquest of Granada” the brilliant
stories of Spanish chivalry and adventure, which were continued by
William Hickling Prescott in “The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and
Isabella,” “The Conquest of Mexico” and “The Conquest of Peru.” The
writings of Prescott and Irving have a kind of antique gorgeousness
in which the modern historian does not allow himself to indulge. The
history of the French and the Indians and the pioneers appealed to
the genius of Francis Parkman. The beginner may settle down to any
book of Parkman’s with the happy certainty of finding a brilliant
and thrilling story. John Lothrop Motley, in “The Rise of the Dutch
Republic” and “The United Netherlands,” treats of a people whose story
the American reader may learn in youth or may postpone until after
he has become acquainted with some books on English and American
history. The colonial history of America is best read in the work
of John Fiske, whose gifts of style and philosophic outlook on life
place him among the great historians. The history of America from the
beginning to modern times must be read in books by various authors,
who deal with limited sections and periods. It is especially true of
recent periods that no one historian is adequate. Partisanship and
our closeness to the Civil War have prevented the American historian
from seeing the conflict clearly in its relations to the rest of our
national story, and for a just impression of the struggle between
the states, the reader should go to the documents and the memoirs of
the time. The reminiscences of the political leaders, the biography
of Lincoln, and the excellent narratives of Union and Confederate
generals--Grant, Alexander, Longstreet, Gordon, Sherman, Sheridan, and
others--constitute a history of the period. There is peculiar validity
in the reminiscences of the contemporary witnesses of historical
events. The writer of autobiography and memoirs is not expected to
give final judgments, and we unconsciously allow for his personal
limitation. The professional historian, on the other hand, is obliged
to make sweeping decisions, and we are likely too often to accept his
decisions as final, unless we are trained and critical students of
history. If one reads several memoirs of the same period, one gradually
forms an historical judgment about it and comes to a position midway
between the points of view of the various writers.

The young man beginning to read history now, as Green began Gibbon at
sixteen, may consider whether he will devote himself to the task of
writing the history of the American people. Even if his ambitions are
not so high, he may be sure that as a citizen of the Republic he can
never know too much about the history of his nation and of the men who
helped to make it.

As aids to historical reading, it is well to have some books of bare
facts, a short history of America, a dictionary of dates, and a compact
general encyclopedia of events, such as Ploetz’s “Epitome.” But these
are for reference and not for entertainment. As a rule, text books
of history prepared for schools, however excellent they may be for
the purposes of study, are not entertaining to read. They have not
space for all the elaborate plots, political intrigues, biographical
interludes, accounts of popular movements of thought, which appeal to
the imagination of the leisurely reader. Our school teachers will
take care that we learn the salient facts which everyone must know.
By ourselves we shall dip into Parkman’s “Montcalm and Wolfe” or
Prescott’s “Conquest of Mexico” or Carlyle’s “French Revolution.” In
reading these masterpieces for pleasure, we shall be supplementing our
work in school and making our daily lessons easier.


LIST OF WORKS OF HISTORY

_Supplementary to Chapter VII_

The following list of titles is not intended to outline an adequate
reference library for the student of history. It includes principally
books that have taken their place in literature by virtue of their
readability and their imaginative power, and may therefore be supposed
to interest the general reader. A few books are included which deal
with current historical problems and politics.


AMERICAN HISTORY


 HENRY ADAMS. _History of the United States._

Covers exhaustively the period immediately following the Revolution.


 GEORGE BANCROFT (1800-91). _History of the United States from the
 Discovery of the Continent to 1789._


 JAMES BRYCE. _The American Commonwealth._

The recognized authority on American political institutions.


 EDWARD CHANNING. _Students’ History of the United States._

Said to be the best of the one-volume histories of this country.


 JOHN FISKE (1842-1901). _Discovery of America, with Some Account
 of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest._ _New France and New
 England._ _Old Virginia and Her Neighbors._ _The Beginnings of New
 England._ _The Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and
 Religious Liberty._ _Dutch and Quaker Colonies in America._ _American
 Revolution._ _Critical Period of American History (1783-89)._ _War
 of Independence._ _Mississippi Valley in the Civil War._ _Civil
 Government in the United States._


 JOHN BROWN GORDON. _Reminiscences of the Civil War._


 ALBERT BUSHNELL HART (and collaborators). _American History Told by
 Contemporaries._

Four volumes of extracts from diaries and writers who lived in the
epochs under consideration. A rich source of information and enjoyment,
as are also the following books:

 _How Our Grandfathers Lived._ _Colonial Children._ _Camps and
 Firesides of the Revolution._ _Romance of the Civil War._


 WILLIAM EDWARD HARTPOLE LECKY. _American Revolution._

Selected from his “History of England in the Eighteenth Century.” This
with Trevelyan’s “American Revolution” will give American readers the
history of the conflict from a British point of view.


 JAMES LONGSTREET. _From Manassas to Appomattox._

To be read in conjunction with the Memoirs by Grant, Porter, Sherman,
Gordon, Alexander, and other Union and Confederate generals.


 FRANCIS PARKMAN (1823-93). _The Oregon Trail._ _France and England in
 North America._

“France and England in North America” is divided into seven parts under
the following titles:

 _Pioneers of France in the New World_; _The Jesuits in North America
 in the Seventeenth Century_; _La Salle and the Discovery of the Great
 West_; _The Old Régime in Canada_; _Count Frontenac and New France
 under Louis XIV_; _A Half Century of Conflict_; _Montcalm and Wolfe_.


 JAMES FORD RHODES. _History of the United States from the Compromise
 of 1850._


 THEODORE ROOSEVELT. _American Ideals._ _The Naval War of 1812._ _The
 Winning of the West._


 ELLEN CHURCHILL SEMPLE. _American History and Its Geographic
 Conditions._


 GOLDWIN SMITH. _Canada and the Canadian Question._ _The United States,
 an Outline of Political History._


 GEORGE OTTO TREVELYAN. _American Revolution._


 WOODROW WILSON. _Congressional Government: a Study in American
 Politics._ _History of the American People._

The second work, in five volumes, covers the history of the country
from the beginnings to the present time; both readable and trustworthy.


GREAT BRITAIN


 FRANCIS BACON (1561-1626). _History of the Reign of Henry VII._

The first great piece of critical history in our language.


 HENRY THOMAS BUCKLE. _History of Civilization in England._


 THOMAS CARLYLE (1795-1881). _Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, with
 Elucidations._


 EARL OF CLARENDON (1608-74). _History of the Great Rebellion._

A vivid account of the Cromwellian wars by a royalist. Interesting to
read in connection with Carlyle’s “Elucidations” of the letters and
speeches of Cromwell.


 MANDELL CREIGHTON. _Age of Elizabeth._


 EDWARD AUGUSTUS FREEMAN (1823-92). _History of the Norman Conquest._
 _William the Conquerer._ _Growth of the English Constitution from the
 Earliest Times._


 JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE (1818-94). _History of England from the Fall of
 Wolsey to the Defeat of the Armada._


 SAMUEL RAWSON GARDINER. _A Student’s History of England._ _History of
 England from the Accession of James to the Outbreak of the Civil War._
 _History of the Great Civil War._ _History of the Commonwealth and the
 Protectorate._

The three histories last named constitute a continuous work of eighteen
volumes. Gardiner is not the easiest historian to read, but his work
is indispensable to anyone who would get a true view of a period which
more than any other in English history has been discolored by brilliant
biased historians, from Clarendon to Carlyle and Macaulay.


 JOHN RICHARD GREEN (1837-83). _A Short History of the English People._
 _The Making of England._ _The Conquest of England._ _A History of the
 English People._

The “History” is a longer, though, perhaps, not a “greater,” book than
the “Short History.”


 RICHARD HAKLUYT (1553-1616). _The Principal Navigations, Voyages and
 Discoveries of the English Nation._

In eight volumes of _Everyman’s Library_.


 HENRY HALLAM (1777-1859). _Constitutional History of England._


 DAVID HUME (1711-76). _History of England._

Almost displaced as a historian by later writers, but still interesting
because of his philosophic and literary genius.


 ANDREW LANG. _History of Scotland._


 WILLIAM EDWARD HARTPOLE LECKY. _History of England in the Eighteenth
 Century._


 THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY (1800-59). _History of England from James
 II._

In three volumes in _Everyman’s Library_.


 GOLDWIN SMITH. _The United Kingdom._


 JACQUES NICOLAS AUGUSTIN THIERRY. _History of the Norman Conquest of
 England._

In _Everyman’s Library_.


FRANCE


 EDMUND BURKE (1729-97). _Reflections on the Revolution in France._


 THOMAS CARLYLE (1795-1881). _The French Revolution._


 VICTOR DURUY. _History of France._

English translation, published by Crowell & Co.


 FRANÇOIS PIERRE GUILLAUME GUIZOT. _History of France from the Earliest
 Times to 1848._


 VICTOR HUGO. _History of a Crime._

Deals with the Coup d’etat of 1851, of which Hugo was a witness.
Vivid, powerful writing, easy to read in the French.


 HENRY MORSE STEPHENS. _History of the French Revolution._

The work of a modern scientific historian, may be read after Carlyle’s
“French Revolution” as a corrective and for the sake of comparing two
historical methods.


 HIPPOLYTE ADOLPHE TAINE. _The Ancient Régime._ _The French
 Revolution._ _The Modern Régime._

The application to French history of somewhat the same philosophic
methods and principles that inform his “History of English Literature.”


GERMANY

 SAMUEL RAWSON GARDINER. _The Thirty Years’ War._


 ERNEST FLAGG HENDERSON. _A Short History of Germany._


 HELMUTH KARL BERNHARD VON MOLTKE. _The Franco-German War._


ANCIENT GREECE

 ALFRED JOHN CHURCH. _Pictures from Greek Life and Story._

Especially adapted to young readers.


 ERNST CURTIUS. _History of Greece._

A monumental German work to be found in a readable translation.


 THOMAS DAVIDSON. _Education of the Greek People and its Influence on
 Civilization._


 GEORGE FINLAY. _Greece Under the Romans._

In _Everyman’s Library_.


 GEORGE GROTE. _History of Greece._

The standard English work in Greek history. In twelve volumes of
_Everyman’s Library_.


 HERODOTUS. _Stories of the East from Herodotus._

Extracts retold by Alfred John Church, especially for young readers.


 JOHN PENTLAND MAHAFFY. _Greek Life and Thought from the Age of
 Alexander to the Roman Conquest._ _A Survey of Greek Civilization._


ANCIENT ROME

 SAMUEL DILL. _Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire._


 EDWARD GIBBON (1737-94). _History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman
 Empire._

The supreme contribution of England to historical literature, in its
combination of distinguished style and scientific method.


 THEODOR MOMMSEN. _History of Rome._

A great German work, in five volumes, to be found in a readable English
translation.


OTHER HISTORIES


 _Cambridge Modern History._

Of this great History planned by the late Lord Acton, ten volumes have
been published. It is the work of many writers and will be a storehouse
of the most competent historical writing of our time.


 JAMES BRYCE. _Holy Roman Empire._

Readers of Bryce’s “American Commonwealth” will seek this other
excellent work.


 JEAN FROISSART. _Chronicles._

In _Everyman’s Library_.

There are several translations and condensations of Froissart’s
“Chronicles,” notably “The Boy’s Froissart,” edited by the American
poet, Sidney Lanier.


 MARY HENRIETTA KINGSLEY. _The Story of West Africa._


 HENRY HART MILMAN (1791-1868). _History of Latin Christianity._


 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. _A Footnote to History: Eight Years of Trouble
 in Samoa._

A fine piece of historical writing showing that Stevenson had the gifts
of the historian as well as the gifts of the poet and romancer.


 WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT (1796-1859). _Conquest of Mexico._ _Conquest
 of Peru._ _Reign of Philip Second._ _Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella._


 JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY (1814-77). _Rise of the Dutch Republic._ _History
 of the United Netherlands._


 ARCHIBALD FORBES. _The Afghan Wars._

A mixture of history and vivid reporting by a great war correspondent.


 PIERRE LOTI. _Last Days of Pekin._


 WASHINGTON IRVING (1783-1859). _Knickerbocker’s History of New York._
 _The Conquest of Granada._

These books demonstrate the wide range of Irving’s genius from
burlesque, mingled with genuine study of racial characteristics, to
sober and poetic history.


 FRANÇOIS MARIE AROUET (VOLTAIRE). _History of Charles XII of Sweden._

Accompanied in the English translation by the critical essays of
Macaulay and Carlyle. Easy to read in the French.


 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS (1840-93). _Renaissance in Italy._

A work of rare beauty on the men, the history, and the art of Italy.


 WALTER RALEIGH (1552-1618). _The Discovery of the Empire of Guiana._
 _A History of the World._

Raleigh’s “History of the World” is not so large as it sounds in scope,
but in imagination it almost lives up to its title. Thoreau says: “He
is remarkable in the midst of so many masters. There is a natural
emphasis in his style, like a man’s tread, and a breathing space
between his sentences.”


 FREDERIC HARRISON. _The Meaning of History._

An excellent guide to the reading of history.


FOOTNOTES:

[3] See also page 244 of this Guide.




CHAPTER VIII

THE READING OF BIOGRAPHY


Since literature is, broadly, the written record of human life,
biography, the life story of real men, lies at the core and center of
literature. On one side biography is allied to history, which is the
collective biography of many men. On the other side it is related to
fiction.

In our discussion of “History” we found that there are two ideals or
methods of writing it: one the picturesque, the other the scientific.
The scientific historian accuses the picturesque historian of
falsifications and disproportions. Scientific history is new and
aggressive and it accentuates its differences from the old ideals.
Yet there is no essential opposition between fact and an imaginative
representation of fact. Gibbon is picturesque, yet he is one of the
first great historians to make exhaustive study and accurate use of
documents. Carlyle can be as eloquent when he is telling the truth
as when he is misled by his love of color and his partisan passions.
The great historian of the future will not falsify or distort facts
except as human nature must always intervene before the facts
which it presents in human language. The true historian will have
great imagination, great vision, and yet have scrupulous care to
precisions of truth. For the present, history is recovering from its
traditional eloquence and trying to learn to present facts honestly
and clearly. Never again will the spirit of history and historical
criticism tolerate such a magnificent fabrication as the end of De
Quincey’s “Flight of a Tartar Tribe,” in which he gives, with all the
paraphernalia of a learned note, the inscription carved on the columns
of granite and brass to commemorate the migration of the Kalmucks. The
columns are a structure of De Quincey’s fancy, and the inscription
is in such prose as he alone among white men or Chinamen knew how
to write! In De Quincey’s time it was not considered an ethical
aberration to invent facts. In a ponderous article which he wrote for
the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ on Shakespeare, he quoted the poet from
memory and spun some of the biography from his own fancy. The pious and
learned President of Harvard College, Jared Sparks, for the greater
glory of America and its founder, “improved” the style of Washington’s
private papers and ably defended the emendations. And Weems, an early
biographer of the man who seems nobler the more truly we know him and
who needs no legend to dignify him, wrote his life of Washington with
the deliberate purpose, indicated on the title page, of inculcating
patriotic and moral lessons in the young. Hence the cherry-tree story.

History has improved in its morals, if not in its manners, and
scientific biography is making some headway. But biography is still
in a hazy state of legend and myth. Approach any man you choose,
especially among men of letters who have been written about by
other men of letters, and you find a mass of conjecture and legend
masquerading as fact. Sometimes there is an added garment of disguise,
the dignified gown of science and scholarship.

No great writer has suffered from credulous and weak-principled
biographers so much as the greatest of all--Shakespeare. Most of the
lives of him are gigantic myths, built on hardly as many known facts
as would fill two pages of this book. Of late historians and men
of science have begun to laugh at literary biographers for making
such confusion of the institution of Shakespeare biography. It is
well enough for the young reader to learn carefully the biographical
notes prefixed to the school editions of Shakespeare, for the better
the young reader learns school exercises and the notes in the text
books, the better basis he has for reading and thinking for himself.
I may say, however, that there are at present, so far as I know,
only two books on the life of Shakespeare which are trustworthy,
Halliwell-Phillips’s “Outlines,” which gives all the documents, and
a recent masterly discussion of the documents by George G. Greenwood
called “The Shakespeare Problem Restated.” It is a problem and not
one for us to go into here except that it illustrates what we are
saying about scientific and fanciful biography. I should not wonder
if another generation were more interested than our fathers have been
in the poetic achievements, whatever they are, of the man whose
youthful portrait is on the cover of this book--Francis Bacon. One
thing is certain: the rising generation had better learn early to
approach with caution and tolerant scepticism books bearing such titles
as “Shakespeare, Man, Player and Poet,” “Shakespeare, His Life, His
Mind and His Art.” We had better bend our attentions to the plays
themselves, and when we wish to read _about_ Shakespeare, turn not
to the so-called biographies and “studies in Shakespeare” by college
professors, but to the great critics, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Lamb, De
Quincey, Pater.

As we said that we, mere readers, should leave scientific history in
the hands of specialists, so we may leave the problems of literary
biography to expert investigators. We are interested rather in that
kind of biography which is as old as the earliest legends of heroes,
that which celebrates the great ones of the earth. If it is true to
fact so much the better; but since biographers are likely to be the
friends, kinsmen, admirers of their subjects, biography will be the
last division of history to be informed with the scientific spirit. And
so far as it is an art, it will err on the right side, like fiction and
poetry, by presenting an ennobled view of human nature.

That biography is an art is proved by the admittedly great examples.
The novelist who creates a fictitious biography has no more difficult
and delicate task than the biographer who finds in a real life story
the true character of a man, and gives to the events which produced
the character artistic form, unity, and movement. Boswell’s “Life
of Samuel Johnson” and Robert Southey’s “Life of Lord Nelson” are
as beautifully designed as the best novels. Boswell’s masterpiece
resembles a realistic novel and Southey’s “Nelson” is like a romantic
tale of chivalry and heroism.

Benjamin Jowett, the great professor of Greek at Oxford, said that
biography is the best material for ethical teaching. In many ways it
is the best material for all kinds of teaching. For everything that
human beings have done and thought is to be found in the life stories
of interesting individuals, so that biography opens the way to every
subject. In our discussion of history we said that the directest
path to the heart of an historical epoch is through the biography of
an important figure or a wise observer of that epoch. There is no
better political history of America during the Civil War than Nicolay
and Hay’s “Life of Lincoln.” Grant’s “Memoirs” contains all that an
ordinary reader needs to know of the movements of the Northern armies
after Grant took command. The memoirs and reminiscences of Davis and
Confederate generals give us an adequate account of the civil and
military movements of the Southern side. Carlyle’s “Cromwell,” no
matter how biased and overwrought it seems to discriminating students,
will open the seventeenth century for those of us who cannot be
specialists in history. Bourrienne’s “Memoirs of Napoleon,” in the
English translation, is a good introduction to the history of Europe
during the Napoleonic wars (and it makes little difference to us that
the book was largely rewritten and augmented by the French editor).
Morley’s “Life of Gladstone” is a history of Victorian England. The
life of Luther is the heart of the Protestant Reformation.

The layman who would know something of the tendencies of modern science
cannot do better than to read the biographies of men of science in
which sympathetic pupils have told in a style more simple than the
masters’ treatises the intellectual principles and human conditions
of the masters’ work. Such biographies are the “Life and Letters” of
Darwin, of Huxley, of Agassiz. The “Life of Pasteur” by Valery-Radot,
which has been translated into English, is a clear account of the main
tendencies of modern medicine, the subject that all the world is so
much interested in. Anyone who reads it will know better how to make
his way through the masses of popular articles on medicine and public
health in the current magazines.

Since literary men are the most interesting of all heroes to other
makers of books, it is natural that the lives of the masters of
literature should have been written in greater abundance and usually
with greater skill and charm than the lives of any other class of
men. A good way, perhaps the best way, to study literature is to
read the lives of a dozen or a score of great writers. An ambitious
youth, determined to lay the foundations of a knowledge of literature,
might begin to read in any order the biographies in the series called
_English Men of Letters_. From that series I should cross out William
Black’s “Goldsmith” and substitute Forster’s or Washington Irving’s
“Life of Goldsmith”; I should also omit Leslie Stephen’s “George Eliot”
and read instead the “Life and Letters” by J. W. Cross. It would be as
well to pass by Mr. Henry James’s “Hawthorne” in favor of the biography
by Mr. George E. Woodberry in _American Men of Letters_.

It will not be wise even for the enthusiastic reader of literature to
confine his reading in biography to the lives of men of letters. There
is such a thing as being too much interested in bookish persons. Men
of action have led more eventful lives than most writers, and their
biographers are likely therefore to have more of a story to tell.
Whenever you find yourself interested in any man, when some reference
to him rouses your curiosity, read his biography. In general it is
better to read about him in a complete “Life,” even if it is a bulky
one in a forbidding number of volumes. You are not obliged to read it
all. It is better to roam for half an hour through Boswell than to read
a short life of Johnson. This is a day of pellet books, handy volumes,
and popular compendiums; we need to learn again the use and delight
of a little reading in big books, in which we can dwell for long or
short periods. We need, also, to get over the idea that only learned
persons and special students can go to original documents. A boy of
fifteen will have more fun turning over the state papers and letters
and addresses of Washington and Jefferson and Lincoln than in reading
a short encyclopedia article on one of those great men. Just try it
the next time you happen to be wandering aimlessly in a public library
and see if you do not stumble on something interesting. The whole
“Dictionary of National Biography” is not so much worth owning and,
except for purposes of reference, not so much worth reading as half as
many volumes of first-hand biography.

The first of all original documentary biography is autobiography. A
man knows more about his own life than anyone else and he is quite as
likely to tell the truth about it as his official biographer. “The
Story of My Life” is always an attractive title, no matter who the hero
is. If an autobiography has continued to find readers for a number of
years, it is likely to be worth looking at. Sometimes men who are not
entitled to be called great have written great autobiographies. The
“Autobiography” of Joseph Jefferson is full of delightful humor and
sweetness. At a time when the theater is not an institution of which we
are proud and actors as they appear in the public prints are usually
bores and vulgarians, Jefferson’s “Autobiography” will give the reader
a new sense of the potential dignity of the stage and of the humanity
of the actor’s profession. Among the great men who have written
autobiographies we have mentioned Mill and Franklin and Grant. Others
who have written delightful volumes of self-portraiture are Goethe,
Gibbon, Trollope, Mrs. Oliphant. As a working rule, I should suggest
that when you are interested in a man, you should first read his
autobiography if he wrote one. If he did not, turn to the most complete
story of his life, the one that contains whatever letters and documents
have survived. And as a third choice try to find a life of him by some
writer who was intimate with him during his life, or who is an expert
in the subject to which his life was devoted, or who is a master in the
art of biography.


LIST OF BIOGRAPHIES

_Supplementary to Chapter VIII_

This list of biographies does not constitute a catalogue of great men.
It merely gives some biographies that have literary quality or some
other quality that makes them important. The subject of the biography
is given first whenever the person written about would naturally come
into the mind before the author of the book; thus: Samuel Johnson;
“Life” by James Boswell. In other cases the author comes first; thus:
Plutarch; Lives.


 JOHN AND ABIGAIL ADAMS. _Familiar Letters of John Adams and His Wife,
 Abigail Adams, During the Revolution._


 JOSEPH ADDISON. _Life_, by William John Courthope.

In _English Men of Letters_.


 THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH. _Life_, by Ferris Greenslet.


 ALFRED THE GREAT. _Life_, by Walter Besant.


 HENRI FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL. _Journal_, translated by Mrs. Humphrey Ward.


 AURELIUS AUGUSTINUS. _Confessions of St. Augustine._

A remarkable autobiography. Pusey’s translation is in _Everyman’s
Library_.


 FRANCIS BACON. _Life and Letters_, edited by James Spedding.


 JAMES MATTHEW BARRIE. _Margaret Ogilvy._

Barrie’s life of his mother; a delicious book.


 GEORGE HENRY BORROW. _The Bible in Spain._

The subtitle defines this interesting book: “The journeys, adventures,
and imprisonments of an Englishman in an attempt to circulate the
Scriptures in the peninsula.” Readers of Borrow (see page 75 of this
Guide) will be interested in his “Life and Letters,” edited by William
I. Knapp.


 ROBERT BROWNING. _Life and Letters_, by Alexandra Leighton Orr.


 JAMES BRYCE. _Studies in Contemporary Biography._


 EDMUND BURKE. _Life_, by John Morley.

In _English Men of Letters_.


 ROBERT BURNS. _Life_, by John Gibson Lockhart.


 JULIUS CÆSAR. _Life_, by James Anthony Froude. _Commentaries on the
 Gallic and Civil Wars._


 THOMAS CARLYLE AND MRS. CARLYLE. _Life and Letters_, by James Anthony
 Froude.


 THOMAS DE QUINCEY. _Autobiographic Sketches._ _Confessions of an
 English Opium-Eater._ _Reminiscences of the Lake Poets._


 CHARLES DICKENS. _Life_, by John Forster.

In the edition abridged and revised by the English novelist, the late
George Gissing.


 GEORGE ELIOT. _Letters and Journals_, edited by John Walter Cross.


 RALPH WALDO EMERSON. _Life_, by Oliver Wendell Holmes.

In _American Men of Letters_. See also Emerson’s letters to Carlyle and
John Sterling.


 FRANCIS OF ASSISI. _Life_, by Paul Sabatier.

In the English translation.


 BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. _Autobiography._


 WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE. _Life_, by John Morley.


 JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE. _Autobiography._

Translated in _Bohn’s Library_.


 OLIVER GOLDSMITH. _Life_, by Austin Dobson. See also the biographies
 by John Forster and Washington Irving.


 ULYSSES SIMPSON GRANT. _Personal Memoirs._ _Life_, by Owen Wister (in
 the _Beacon Biographies_).


 THOMAS GRAY. _Letters_, edited with a biographical sketch by Henry
 Milnor Rideout.


 ALEXANDER HAMILTON. _Life_, by Henry Cabot Lodge.

In _American Statesmen_.


 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. _Hawthorne and His Circle_, by Julian Hawthorne.
 _Life_, by George Edward Woodberry (in _American Men of Letters_).


 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. _Life and Letters_, edited by John Torrey
 Morse, Jr.


 THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY. _Life and Letters_, edited by Leonard Huxley.


 WASHINGTON IRVING. _Life and Letters_, edited by Pierre Munroe Irving.
 _Life_, by Charles Dudley Warner (in _American Men of Letters_).


 JEANNE D’ARC. _Life_, by Francis Cabot Lowell. _Life_, by Andrew
 Lang. _Condemnation and Rehabilitation of Jeanne d’Arc_, by J. E. J.
 Quicherat (in the English translation).


 SAMUEL JOHNSON. _Lives of the Poets_, selected by Matthew Arnold.
 _Life of Johnson_, by James Boswell (in two volumes in _Everyman’s
 Library_).


 JOHN KEATS. _Life_, by Sidney Colvin.

In _English Men of Letters_.


 CHARLES LAMB. _Letters_, edited by Alfred Ainger.


 ROBERT EDWARD LEE. _Life_, by Philip Alexander Bruce. _Life and
 Letters_, by John William Jones. _Recollections and Letters_, by R. E.
 Lee, Jr. _Life_, by Thomas Nelson Page.


 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. _Life_, by John George Nicolay and John Hay. _A Short
 Life of Abraham Lincoln_, by John George Nicolay. _Lincoln, Master of
 Men_, by Alonzo Rothschild.


 DAVID LIVINGSTONE. _Last Journals in Central Africa. How I Found
 Livingstone_, by Henry Morton Stanley.


 HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. _Life and Letters_, edited by Samuel
 Longfellow.


 THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY. _Life and Letters_, by George Otto
 Trevelyan.


 JOHN STUART MILL. _Autobiography._


 JOHN MILTON. _Life_, by Mark Pattison.

In _English Men of Letters_.


 Napoleon. _Life_, by John Gibson Lockhart. _Life_, by William Milligan
 Sloane. _Memoirs of L. A. F. de Bourrienne._ _Life_, by John Holland
 Rose.


 MARGARET OLIPHANT. _Autobiography and Letters._


 CHARLES WILLIAM CHADWICK OMAN. _Seven Roman Statesmen of the Later
 Republic: the Gracchi, Sulla, Crassus, Cato, Pompey, Cæsar._


 SAMUEL PEPYS. _Diary._

Two volumes in _Everyman’s Library_.


 PLUTARCH. _Lives._

In the Elizabethan translation by Thomas North, or the modern
translation by Arthur Hugh Clough. An abridged edition of this is
published for schools by Ginn & Co.


 JACOB AUGUST RIIS. _The Making of an American._


 WALTER SCOTT. _Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott_, by John
 Gibson Lockhart.

There is an abridged edition of Lockhart, edited by J. M. Sloan.


 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. _The Shakespeare Problem Restated_, by George G.
 Greenwood. _Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare_, by James Orchard
 Halliwell-Phillips.

At the present time the most reliable works on Shakespeare’s life.


 WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN. _Memoirs. Home Letters of General Sherman_,
 edited by M. A. DeWolf Howe.


 ROBERT SOUTHEY. _Life of Nelson._

In _Everyman’s Library_.


 ANTHONY TROLLOPE. _Autobiography._


 IZAAK WALTON. _Lives_ of John Donne, George Herbert and Richard Hooker.


 GEORGE WASHINGTON. _Life of Washington_, by Washington Irving. _The
 Seven Ages of Washington_, by Owen Wister. _Life_, by Woodrow Wilson.


 JOHN WESLEY. _The Heart of Wesley’s Journal_, with an essay by
 Augustine Birrell, published by Fleming-Revell Co.

The journal is found in four volumes of _Everyman’s Library_.




CHAPTER IX

THE READING OF ESSAYS


All literature consists of the written opinions and ideas, the
knowledge and experience, of individuals; it is a chorus of human
voices. Often the individuality of the creative artist is lost in the
magnitude of the work. It is present, necessarily, in every line, but
in the highest forms of literature, epic and dramatic poetry, the
personal lineaments are dissolved. Shakespeare, sincerest of poets, did
not in his dramas reveal his heart or directly utter a single belief
that we can feel sure was the private conviction of the author, and
the attempts to associate lines from Shakespeare with the personal
experiences of the actor of Stratford are invariably grotesque. Homer,
who, according to Mr. Kipling, “smote his bloomin’ lyre” and “winked
back” at us, was no such living man; it is likely that even if there
was a Homer, a poet who made the nucleus of “Iliad,” many hands during
several centuries produced the Greek epics, “The Iliad” and “The
Odyssey,” as we have them. Although Dante writes in the first person,
his adventures in worlds beyond the earth are those of a disembodied
spirit, a universal soul seeing visions in regions where he must put
off something of his personality before he can enter. In the places
where his prejudices and local enmities creep into his immense epic
of the heavens, his work is least poetic; it is precipitated from the
ideal to a kind of ghostly guide book, and the voices of the angels and
the winds of the under world for the moment become still.

The novelist at his best disappears from his work. There is no greater
shock than when at the end of “The Newcomes,” Thackeray abruptly
wrenches us from the deathbed of Colonel Newcome and says that he, W.
M. Thackeray, has just written a story and that it is now fading away
into Fableland. A device of printing would save us from the shock;
the epilogue ought to begin on a new page, and a large “Finis” should
follow Colonel Newcome’s death. The person who makes a work of art has
the privilege of talking about himself in a preface; after that he must
stand back and let the stage fill with characters.

Even in great art, however, we do feel the presence of a man and we are
willing to let him step in front of his stage sometimes and talk in his
own person. The best English novelists, Fielding, Thackeray, George
Eliot, Meredith, are essayists for pages at a time, and most of us do
not resent their intrusion. We like writers who use the capital I.

So we take peculiar delight in that kind of literature which is
avowedly a talk, a monologue in which an author discourses, not through
poetic forms, or through fiction in which other characters are the
speakers, but directly to us as in a private letter or a spoken
lecture. This kind of discourse is called an essay. The man who talks
may pretend to be something that he is not, and the essayist is often a
writer of fiction portraying only one character. Such was Lamb when he
pretended to be Elia; such was Swift in many of his pamphlets; such was
the “_Spectator_,” a multiple personality whose wig Addison and Steele
and their friends could put on at will.

Whether it is a real or a fictitious person who addresses us through
the essay, the form of the essay is the same, a direct communication
from a “me” to a “you.”

The essay may have for its subject anything under the sun. It may be
a short biography with critical comment, as in Macaulay’s essays on
Addison, on Chatham, on Clive, and Carlyle’s essays on Burns and Scott.
Other essays by Macaulay and Carlyle are on a framework of historical
narrative. Oliver Wendell Holmes invented an essay form all his own in
“The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table,” in which the opinions of the
autocrat are linked together by a pleasant boarding-house romance. And
he achieved an unusual triumph when he continued the form in other
books, “The Poet at the Breakfast Table” and “The Professor at the
Breakfast Table,” and did not suffer the disaster that usually befalls
a writer’s effort to repeat a success.

Most of the written philosophy of the modern world is in the form of
essays. In Emerson we have philosophy in short eloquent discourses,
many of them like sermons. Political arguments and orations, if they
have literary quality, like those of Burke and Webster, properly come
under the head of essay. And almost all of the important body of
literature called criticism is in essay form.

To say that every kind of writing seems to be essay which is not
something else is, like some other Hibernian statements, a short way of
expressing the truth. To be an artistic essay, to be really worthy the
name, a composition must have in it a living personality. Personality
is the soul of the essay. We do not admit under the term, essay, broad
as it is, the discourse which has only utility to recommend it. An
article on “How Our Presidents are Elected” may be instructive, it may
be more necessary to the education of the young citizen than Leigh
Hunt’s chat about stage-coaches. But Hunt’s chat is an essay: the other
is not. A present-day indication of the difference between the essay
and the unliterary form of exposition is the habit of our magazines of
classifying all prose pieces that tell us “how” and “what” as “special
articles,” whereas “essays”--the editors do not print essays if they
can help it! If a modern writer has an idea that would make an essay
he is tempted to disguise it under some more acceptable shape. But the
editors would retort--and with justice--that they would gladly print
essays if they could get good ones.

There is something frank and immediate in the appeal of an essay;
the writer of it must be able to talk continuously well; he has
no surprises of plot to fall back on to wake the interest of an
inattentive auditor; he stands before us on a bare platform with no
stage lights or scenery to help him. When he succeeds, his reward is
a kind of personal victory, he finds not only readers but friends.
This is especially true of those essayists who discourse of “things
in general,” the true essayists, Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, Leigh
Hunt, Montaigne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Robert Louis Stevenson, Oliver
Goldsmith. The true essayist, like the Walrus in “Alice in Wonderland,”
advises us that the time has come

      To talk of many things:
    Of shoes--and ships--and sealing wax--
      Of cabbages--and kings--
    And why the sea is burning hot--
      And whether pigs have wings.

And he proceeds, subject to no obligation in the world except the great
obligation never to be dull. The obligation upon the essayist not to
be dull imposes a peculiar obligation upon the reader that he shall be
keen-witted. A stupid person may be stirred to attention by a novel or
a play, but no stupid person can enjoy an essay. Indeed a taste for
essays is a pretty sure sign of a reader who appreciates the literary
spirit in itself.

Just as the essay form is a kind of test of appreciation, so certain
writers are touchstones by which the taste of the reader may be judged.
One such touchstone is Charles Lamb, the prince of English essayists.
Whoever likes Lamb with unfeigned enthusiasm has passed the frontier
of reading and is at home in the universe of books. The reader who
hopes to care for the best in Lamb will not do well, I think, to begin
with the most familiar of his essays “A Dissertation on Roast Pig”;
certainly he will not stop with that, for it has not Elia’s finest
smile nor even his jolliest fooling. And of course it has not his
wisdom and pathos. The young reader can in an hour read a half dozen of
Lamb’s essays, “Old China,” “The Superannuated Man,” “Dream Children,”
“Imperfect Sympathies,” “The Sanity of True Genius” and “A Chapter
on Ears,” and get a taste of his sweet variety. Lamb is one of the
easiest of writers to read entire. His attempts at fiction and even his
verse may be disregarded. The true Lamb, the Lamb of the essays and
the letters, which are as good as essays, can be contained in a couple
of volumes of moderate size. The essays of Elia are printed in many
cheap editions; I have seen a book seller’s counter stacked high with
copies at twenty-five cents. As late as 1864, the editor of the first
complete edition of Lamb thought that the public at large knew him but
little, though his fame and popularity had increased since his death. I
believe that since 1864 his popularity has increased still more--those
twenty-five cent editions seem to show that in his own phrase, he has
become “endenizened” in the heart of the English-speaking nations.

Perhaps the beginner will be a little perplexed at first by the
obscurity of Lamb’s allusions to literature, for though he says that
he could “read almost anything,” he has a special liking for the
quaint, and half the books that he mentions will be unfamiliar to the
modern reader. But any book that pleased him will be worth looking at,
and there is so much of common humanity in him that one can pass over
his obscure references and still understand and enjoy him. So that if I
recommend as the best possible short guide to literature his “Detached
Thoughts on Books and Reading,” I do not forget that the beginner will
not recognize all the book titles and authors that Lamb touches with
affectionate familiarity. Yet the thoughts are clear enough and have
more of the true spirit of reading packed into them than is to be found
in many a thick volume of literary criticism. The essays that touch the
heart of the simplest reader, such as “Dream Children,” may be read
first, and they will lead to the literary essays, which are the best of
all criticisms in the English language. Knowledge of Lamb is knowledge
of literature. He opens the way not only to the choicest old books, but
to the finest of his contemporaries. No man knew better than he the
value of those friends of his whom we have set high in literature; he
measured their altitude while they were swinging into place among the
poetic stars.

As the chief master of literary ceremonies of his time, Lamb will be
found at his best not only in his essays but in his letters. His essays
have the informality of letters, and his letters have much of the
choiceness of phrase, the original turn of thought that distinguish
his essays. In his friendly letters you can meet almost everybody worth
knowing in that great period of English literature. Lamb is among the
fine few whose correspondence is a work of literary art.

The literature of private letters stands somewhere between essays
and biography and partakes of the interest of both. The good letter
writer is as rare in printed books as in the mail bags that are now
hurrying over the world; and the delight of reading good printed
letters by a distinguished man is somewhat like the delight of reading
a well-written letter from a friend. To be sure, a book of letters is
not a masterwork of art, but it often brings pleasure when the reader
is not just in mood for the artistic masterpiece, for the great poem or
novel. I can recommend for a place in a library even of very limited
dimensions such a collection of letters as Mr. E. V. Lucas’s “The
Gentlest Art,” or Scoones’s “English Letters.”

It is said that the modern modes of communication, the telegraph, the
telephone, the unpardonable post card, have caused or accompanied a
decline in the art of letter writing. But the mail of the day has not
yet been sorted; there may be great letter writers even now sending to
their friends epistles that we shall some day wish to read in print.
It hardly seems as if the world could be growing so unfriendly that it
will let polite correspondence go the way of some other old-fashioned
graces. Certainly the young man and the young woman can do nothing
better for the pleasure of friends and family, and nothing better for
their own self-cultivation, than to develop the habit of careful and
courteous letter writing. Better than most school courses in literature
and composition would be the daily practice of writing to some brother,
sister or friend. One of the most remarkable young writers of the
present day owes much of her purity of style, much of her education, to
the practice of writing--no, of _rewriting_ letters to her many friends.

Our friendly letters need not be stiff compositions written with the
nose to the paper and the tongue squeezed painfully between the lips.
But they should be written with care. A rewritten letter need not be an
artificial thing. Why should we not take pains in phrasing a message to
a friend? Neither sincerity nor “naturalness” enjoins us to send off
the first blotted drafts of our communications, any more than freedom
and “naturalness” oblige us to go out in public hastily dressed. Candor
and spontaneity do not suffer from a care for our phrases and some
thought in grooming our style.

If the courtly letter and the well-bred essay are not the
characteristic literary form of our generation, we have some writers of
satire and of literary and political opinions who deserve to be ranked
among the essayists. Mr. F. P. Dunne would have been a pamphleteer in
Swift’s time, a writer of the chatty essay in the days of Lamb and
Hunt. Since he was born to bless our time, he finds a wider audience
by putting his wit and wisdom, his Celtic blend of irony and humanity,
into the mouth of “Mr. Dooley.” Another essayist of great power,
though he is probably not called an “essayist” in the encyclopedias,
is Mark Twain. He promises us an interminable Autobiography, some
parts of which have been published. It is to be different from all
other autobiographies, for the principle of its construction is that
it is to have no order; he will talk about anything that happens to
interest him, talk about it until he is tired of it and then talk about
something else. This unprincipled willfulness of order and subject
is the essayist’s special privilege. No man since Elia has succeeded
better than Mark Twain in keeping up the interest of discursive
monologue about things in general. Our public does not yet know how
great a writer is this master of the American joke, and there are
critics who will cry out that the mention of Mark Twain and Charles
Lamb in the same breath is a violation of good sense. Yet Charles
Lamb’s “Autobiography” is, except in its brevity, as like to the
fragments of Mark Twain as the work of two men can be.

“Below the middle stature,” says Elia of himself, “cast of face
slightly Jewish, with no Judaic tinge in his complexional religion;
stammers abominably, and is therefore more apt to discharge his
occasional conversation in a quaint aphorism, or a poor quibble, than
in set and edifying speeches; has consequently been libeled as a person
always aiming at wit; which, as he told a dull fellow that charged
him with it, is at least as good as aiming at dullness. A small eater,
but not drinker; confesses a partiality for the production of the
juniper berry; was a fierce smoker of tobacco, but may be resembled to
a volcano burnt out, emitting only now and then an occasional puff....
He died ----, 18--, much lamented.” The footnote to the last sentence
reads: “To anybody.--Please to fill up these blanks.” That is about as
near to Mark Twain’s manner of fooling as anything in literature. All
the genial essayists are given to jest and quibble and folly. And when
you come upon a writer whose fantastic whimsies and nonsensical abandon
are charming, be sure to turn the page, for you will invariably find
wisdom and pathos and greatness of heart.

In one class of essay Mark Twain is past master, the essay of travel.
In “A Tramp Abroad” and “Following the Equator,” not to speak of that
satire on foolish American tourists, “Innocents Abroad,” we have not
only some of the best of Mark Twain’s writing, but examples of a kind
of essay in which very few authors have succeeded. The traveler who
can see things with his own eye and make the reader see them, with a
tramp’s independence of what guide books, geographies, and histories
say, is the rarest of companions. A good essay in travel looks easy
when it is done, but is very seldom met with because the independent
eye is so seldom placed in a human head. Moreover, until recent times
of cheap transit, most men of letters have been obliged to stay at
home and make literature of domestic materials or what the great world
sent them in books. Though literature of travel is very old, going back
to the time when the first educated man visited a neighboring tribe
and lived to return home and tell the tale, yet the personal essay of
travel is, in its abundance, the product of the nineteenth century,
when authors ceased to be poor and could circumnavigate the globe.

The English historian, Kinglake, is remembered not for his “Crimean
War” but for his “Eothen,” published in 1844. It was so strange and
fresh a book of travel that several London publishers rejected it. An
account of a journey in the East that omitted information about many
great landmarks of Palestine and had not a word of statistics--how
could a publisher recommend it to the British people? One secret of the
book is that Kinglake, having tried to write his travels in various
forms and having failed, hit on the plan of addressing his account to a
friend, and the feeling of freedom which this gave him prevented him,
he says, “from robing my thoughts in the grave and decorous style which
I should have maintained if I had professed to lecture to the public.
Whilst I feigned to myself that you, and only you, were listening,
I could not by any possibility speak very solemnly. Heaven forbid
that I should talk to my genial friend as though he were a great and
enlightened Community, or any other respectable Aggregate.” Thus it
came about that Kinglake, aiming at one friend, reached the community,
the “Aggregate,” and found in it a host of friends.

In the same year that saw the publication of “Eothen,” Thackeray began
his “Journey from Cornhill to Cairo,” another book of travel that
stands like a green tree in a world of guide posts. Among American
writers, besides Mark Twain, who have made delightful books of their
journeys abroad, are Aldrich, Howells, and Charles Dudley Warner.

These touring essayists are usually more interested in living people
than in monuments of the dead; and they take more pleasure in their
own opinions and experiences than in encyclopedic facts. They are good
traveling companions because they are stored with wisdom and sympathy
before they set sail, and in the presence of strange sights and scenes
they give play to their fancy. So they are akin not so much to the
professional traveler, the geographer and student of social conditions,
as to the essayist who is good company at home.

That is what the essayist must be, above all other writers--unfailing
good company. He may be philosopher, historian, or critic, but if he
is to be numbered among the choice company of essayists, his pages
must be lighted by the glow of friendliness, enlivened by the voice
of comradeship. Sometimes this friendliness takes terribly unfriendly
forms, as in the stinging irony of Swift or the hot thunder and
lightning of Carlyle; these preachers seem not to love their audience,
but at heart they have sympathy even for us whom they browbeat, and it
is not we, but the heavy thoughts with which their souls are burdened,
that have banished the smile from their faces.


LIST OF ESSAYS

_Supplementary to Chapter VIII_


 JOSEPH ADDISON (1672-1719). _Selections from the Spectator._

Edited by Thomas Arnold in the _Clarendon Press Series_. There are many
school editions of the De Coverley papers. A sense of unity rather
than of excellence has singled out the De Coverley papers for school
reading and has made them, consequently, the best known of Addison’s
(and Steele’s) work. But only about a third of the De Coverley papers
are among the fifty best essays from the _Spectator_. Owing to the
weight of eighteenth-century tradition, under which criticism is still
laboring, Addison’s reputation is greater among professional writers
about literature than many modern readers, coming with fresh mind to
the _Spectator_, can quite sincerely feel is justified. Only the mature
reader who has some historical understanding of Addison’s time can
appreciate his cool wit and somewhat pallid humor, and feel how nearly
perfect is the adaptation of his style to his purpose and his limited
thoughts.


 MATTHEW ARNOLD (1822-88). _Essays in Criticism._ _Culture and Anarchy._

Arnold’s essays on books and writers are among the very best, for he
combines deep knowledge of literature with the charm of the true
essayist. His essays on “Culture,” like many of the literary sermons
of Carlyle and Ruskin, propound with great earnestness what every
well-bred person takes more or less for granted. But one reason we
take the need of culture for granted, one reason that such sermons are
becoming obsolete, is because Carlyle and Ruskin and Arnold made their
ideas, through their writings and the hosts of writers they influenced,
part of the common current thought of our time.


 FRANCIS BACON (1561-1626). _Essays._ _Wisdom of the Ancients._ _The
 Advancement of Learning._

There are many inexpensive editions of the “Essays,” and good texts of
Bacon’s other work in English prose have been prepared for students.
Owing to their brevity the “Essays” are the best known of Bacon’s prose
work. But compared with the longer works of Bacon, they are scarcely
more than _tours de force_, experiments in epigrammatic condensation.
Not the young reader, but the mature reader who would know the
Elizabethan age, its noblest thinker and the most eloquent prose
contemporary with the King James Bible, will wish to read Bacon’s life
and works in Spedding’s edition.


 THOMAS BROWNE (1605-82). _Religio Medici._ _Urn Burial._ _Enquiries
 into Vulgar Errors._

The three or four small books of this very great essayist are to be
found in a volume of the _Golden Treasury Series_, and also in the
fine little Dent edition.


 EDMUND BURKE (1729-97). _Speech on American Taxation._ _Speech on
 Conciliation with America._ _Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol._

A good edition of Burke’s principal speeches is that edited by F. G.
Selby and published by Macmillan. The prescriptions of the schools
have made the “Speech on Conciliation” familiar as a difficult thing
to analyze rather than as a magnificent essay (for essay it is, though
delivered as a speech). Burke’s other philosophic and political essays
are among the great prose of his century and should be sought both by
the student of history and by the reader of literature.


 JOHN BURROUGHS. _Birds and Poets._ _Locusts and Wild Honey._
 _Wake-Robin._

After Thoreau Mr. Burroughs is the most distinguished of modern writers
on nature and out-of-door life.


 THOMAS CARLYLE (1795-1881). _Sartor Resartus._ _Heroes and
 Hero-Worship._ _Past and Present._ _Critical and Miscellaneous Essays._

“Heroes and Hero-Worship” is, for the beginner, the best, because the
clearest, of Carlyle’s work. Carlyle’s opinions become of less and
less consequence as time passes, and he remains great by virtue of the
superbly eloquent passages in which the poet overcomes the preacher. He
is an illustrious example of the fact that nothing passes so rapidly
as the beliefs of a day which a preacher hurls at the world about
him--and at posterity,--and also of the fact that eloquence and beauty
survive the original burning question which gave them life and which
later generations are interested in only from a biographic and historic
point of view. The essay carries in it the journalistic bacteria that
make for its speedy dissolution, but the poetic thought, whatever the
occasion of its utterance, outlives circumstance and changes of ideas
and taste.


 CICERO. _Letters and Orations._

In English, in _Everyman’s Library_.


 SAMUEL MCCHORD CROTHERS. _The Gentle Reader._

The most charming and humorously wise of living American essayists.


 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE (1772-1834). _Biographia Literaria._ _Lectures
 on Shakespeare._

Both in _Bohn’s Library_ and in _Everyman’s Library_. Coleridge’s
detached opinions on books are golden fragments of criticism. His
“Lectures on Shakespeare” are, for a reader with imagination, the most
inspiring notes on Shakespeare that we have, though the many and patent
inaccuracies make his comments distasteful to modern scholars, who
prefer to commit their own inaccuracies.


 WILLIAM COWPER (1731-1800). _Letters._

In the _Golden Treasury Series_.


 DANIEL DEFOE (1661-1731). _Essay on Projects._ _The Shortest Way with
 the Dissenters._

Defoe was a journalist and pamphleteer who lacked the charm of the true
essayist, but whose prose in essay form is worth reading for its vigor
and variety of idea.


 THOMAS DE QUINCEY (1785-1859). _Selections._

In one volume, published by Houghton, Mifflin & Co. “The Confessions
of an English Opium-Eater” is in _Everyman’s Library_, and also the
“Reminiscences of the Lake Poets.” De Quincey’s beautiful poetic prose
is unlike anything before or since. The “Opium-Eater” belongs perhaps
under “Biography,” but may stand here. Its somewhat sensational subject
has secured for it, fortunately, a wide reading and so kept De Quincey
from passing into the shadowy company of distinguished writers known
only to the few. His essays fill many volumes. Those in the inexpensive
volume in the _Camelot Series_, published by Walter Scott, include some
of the best and should be read, perhaps, before the “Opium-Eater.”


 JOHN DRYDEN (1631-1700).

There are collections of Dryden’s prose, but the best way to become
acquainted with “the father of modern English prose” is to run through
his complete works and read the remarkable prefaces to his plays and
poems. In them English criticism, for all the merit of some essays
earlier in the seventeenth century, really begins.

[Illustration: EMERSON]


 FINLEY PETER DUNNE. _Mr. Dooley in Peace and War._ _Mr. Dooley in the
 Hearts of His Countrymen._ _Mr. Dooley’s Philosophy._


 RALPH WALDO EMERSON (1803-82). _Essays._ _Representative Men._ _The
 Conduct of Life._ _Society and Solitude._

Emerson’s essays, including “The American Scholar” (which is as fresh
and pertinent to our time as if written yesterday), have been printed
in inexpensive editions by Houghton, Mifflin & Co. The volumes named
above should be owned in American households. More than Carlyle or
Ruskin or any other of the preaching essayists of the nineteenth
century, Emerson emerges as the prophetic, visionary spirit who seized
and phrased the best moral and spiritual ideas that his time had to
offer to future times.


 JOHN FLORIO (1550-1625). _Translation of Montaigne’s Essays._

There are several handy editions, notably the pocket edition, published
by Dent, of this famous translation whereby Montaigne became an English
classic.


 OLIVER GOLDSMITH (1728-74). _The Citizen of the World._

Among the lighter satirical essays of the eighteenth century “The
Citizen of the World” is second only to the _Spectator_, if not equal
to it.


 WILLIAM HAZLITT (1778-1830). _Essays._

A good selection appears in the _Camelot Series_. “Though we are mighty
fine fellows nowadays,” says Stevenson, “we cannot write like Hazlitt.”
(See Hazlitt’s “English Comic Writers” and “Lectures on the English
Poets” for his studies of Shakespeare).


 LAFCADIO HEARN. _Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan._ _Kokoro: Hints and
 Echoes of Japanese Inner Life._


 OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES (1809-94). _Autocrat of the Breakfast Table._
 _Professor at the Breakfast Table._ _Poet at the Breakfast Table._

In _Everyman’s Library_ and in inexpensive editions, published by
Houghton, Mifflin & Co. A wise, witty, beautifully lucid mind. Holmes
snatched philosophy from the library and brought it to the breakfast
table so that the poorest boarder goes to his day’s work from the
company of an immortal who has met him halfway and talked to him
without condescension.


 JAMES HENRY LEIGH HUNT (1784-1859). _Essays._

One volume of selections in the _Camelot Series_. Also in two volumes
with his poems in the _Temple Classics_ (Dent & Co.). Young readers who
will look at Hunt’s essay “On Getting Up on Cold Mornings” will not
need to be urged further into his delightful society.


 RICHARD JEFFERIES (1848-87). _An English Village._ _Field and
 Hedgerow._ _The Open Air._ _The Story of My Heart._


 SAMUEL JOHNSON (1709-84). _Lives of the Poets._

Students of literature will wish to read one or two of Johnson’s
criticisms. He was a much greater man than writer, better as a talker
and letter writer than as an essayist. A good selection from the “Lives
of the Poets” is edited by Matthew Arnold.


 CHARLES LAMB (1775-1834). _Essays of Elia._

See pages 183-6 of this Guide.


 ABRAHAM LINCOLN (1809-65). _Letters and Speeches._

To be found in the complete works, edited by Nicolay and Hay, and in
several small volumes of selections; the volume in _Everyman’s Library_
has an introduction by James Bryce.


 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL (1819-91). _Among My Books._ _My Study Windows._
 _Democracy and Other Addresses._ _Political Essays._ _Letters._

The foremost American critic. Interest in the bookish and literary side
of Lowell should not lead us to overlook his ringing political essays,
notably that on Lincoln, written during the war and remarkable as
having phrased at the moment the judgment of the next generation.


 THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY (1800-59). _Essays._

There are many editions of the more familiar essays of Macaulay,
especially those that have formed a part of school and college reading
courses. The essay on Milton, unfortunately prescribed in college
preparatory work, is one of the poorest. Those on Clive and Hastings,
also often prescribed, are among the best. It is the prevailing fashion
to underrate Macaulay as a critic, as it was perhaps in his lifetime
the fashion to overrate him. He is lastingly powerful and invigorating,
a great essayist, if only because he knows so well what he wishes to
say and knows precisely how to say it. He is not subtle, not poetic,
but his clear large intellect is still a bright light through the
many-hued mists of Victorian criticism.


 JOHN MILTON (1608-74). _Areopagitica, etc._

Milton’s prose is difficult to read and only a little of it is worth
reading except by the student of Milton and the student of history.
The noblest passages of Milton’s prose have been collected in a single
volume, edited by Ernest Myers, and published by Kegan Paul, Trench &
Co.


 JOHN MUIR. _The Mountains of California._ _Our National Parks._


 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN (1801-90). _Idea of a University._ _Apologia pro
 Vita Sua._

An admirable volume of selections, edited by Lewis E. Gates, is
published by Henry Holt & Co. Newman’s “Apologia” belongs properly in
our list of Biography, but it is really an essay in defense of certain
of his ideas. Owing to the fact that Newman’s work is largely religious
controversy and discourse directed to practical rather than artistic
ends, his literary power and the beauty of his prose have not won him
so many readers as he deserves.


 BLAISE PASCAL (1623-62). _Provincial Letters._

In the English translation of Thomas M’Crie.


 WALTER HORATIO PATER (1839-94). _The Renaissance._ _Appreciations._

The finest English critic of his generation. Contrary to a current
impression that Pater is for the “ultra-literary,” most of his work is
clear and simple; the essays on Wordsworth and Coleridge are the best
to which a reader of those poets can turn.


 JOHN RUSKIN (1819-1900). _Sesame and Lilies._ _Crown of Wild Olive._
 _Queen of the Air._ _Frondes Agrestes._

There are fourteen volumes of Ruskin in _Everyman’s Library_. “Sesame
and Lilies” and “Frondes Agrestes” (selected passages from “Modern
Painters”) have been often reprinted. The best of Ruskin’s prose is
very beautiful, the worst is tediously prolix. He regretted that his
eloquence took attention from his subject matter, but like Carlyle,
he lives by his eloquence and poetry rather than by his opinions and
teachings.


 SYDNEY SMITH (1771-1845). _The Peter Plymley Letters._ _Essays._

In one volume, published by Ward, Lock & Co. After Swift, perhaps the
wittiest English essayist who used his keen weapons in the interests of
justice.


 RICHARD STEELE (1671-1729). _Essays_ from the _Tatler_ and the
 _Spectator_.

Steele is usually found with Addison in selections from the _Spectator_.


 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON (1849-94). _Familiar Studies of Men and Books._
 _Memories and Portraits._ _An Inland Voyage._ _Travels with a Donkey._

The best thoughts of this romancer and some of the best of his writing
are in his essays.


 JONATHAN SWIFT (1667-1745). _Selected Prose._

Selections from his prose writings are to be found in a volume of the
_Camelot Series_ and also in a small volume published by D. Appleton &
Co. Not until the reader is familiar with “Gulliver’s Travels” and has
some understanding of Swift’s life and the historical background of
his work, can he feel the genius of the satirical essays and political
lampoons. Swift is often repellent to those who only half understand
him, but he grows in power and dignity to those who appreciate his
underlying righteousness.


 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY (1811-63). _Book of Snobs._ _Roundabout
 Papers._ _From Cornhill to Cairo._ _English Humorists._

Thackeray is an essayist by temperament and shows it in his novels.
His satirical and literary essays may be reserved until after one has
read his novels, but they will not be overlooked by anyone who likes
Thackeray or who likes good essays.


 HENRY DAVID THOREAU (1817-62). _A Week on the Concord and Merrimac
 Rivers._ _Walden._ _Excursions._ _The Maine Woods._ _Cape Cod._
 _Spring._ _Summer._ _Winter._ _Autumn._

Thoreau’s work is one long autobiographical journal ranging from brief
diary notes on nature to full rounded essays. A prose poet of nature,
and second to Emerson only as a philosophic essayist on nature and
society. His greatness becomes more and more evident in an age when
“nature writers” are popular.


 IZAAK WALTON (1593-1683). _The Complete Angler._ In _Everyman’s
 Library_.


 CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER (1829-1900). _In the Wilderness._ _As We Go._
 _Backlog Studies._ _In the Levant._

A charming essayist, a humorous lover of books and nature. His
reputation has waned somewhat during the past twenty years, but
Americans cannot afford to lose sight of him.


 DANIEL WEBSTER (1782-1852). _Speeches and Orations._

In one volume, published by Little, Brown & Co. The literary quality of
Webster’s orations entitles them to a place among American essays.




CHAPTER X

THE READING OF FOREIGN CLASSICS


Since there is not time in the short life of man to read all the good
books written in one language, the young reader, or even the person
who has formed the habit of reading, may feel that he need never go
beyond the books of his own race. In a sense this is true. Perhaps
it is especially true for us who are born to the English language.
For the English people, however insular they may be in some respects,
have always been great explorers of the lands and the thoughts of
other races. They have plundered the literature of their neighbors and
loaded the borrowed riches into their own books. In the Elizabethan age
some writers seem to have regarded it as a patriotic duty to render
for their countrymen the choicest literature of France and Italy and
Spain. While they were robbing their neighbors across the channel, they
were also building English classics out of the literary monuments of
“insolent Greece and haughty Rome.” And for many generations English
writers, like those of other modern countries, have been brought up on
the classics.

So we find incorporated in English literature the culture of the
entire ancient and modern world, and one who should read only English
books could still have a full mind and a cultivated spirit. We cannot
say, therefore, that it is necessary, in order to realize the true
purpose of reading, to make excursions into the literature of foreign
countries. But we can point out the advantage of such excursions, and
I would insist on the ease with which the ordinary person, who has
enjoyed only a limited formal education, can make himself acquainted
with foreign languages and literatures if he will.

In our time we have schools to teach everything known to man from
advertising to zoölogy. It is well that our schools are broadening in
interest and that every kind of knowledge is being organized so that
it can be imparted. But there is a danger that we may get into the
habit of leaving too much for the schools, that we may come to think
that the schools monopolize all knowledge, or at least all the methods
of teaching. This would be a great pity in a nation that is proud of
self-made men. We, of all peoples, must remember what Walter Scott
said, that the best part of a man’s education is that which he gives
himself. Schools and universities only start us in a methodical way, on
a short well-surveyed path, into the world of knowledge. Most of the
learning of educated men and women is acquired after they have left the
college gates, and anyone may set out on the road to knowledge with
little direct assistance from the schools. The better, the easier for
us, if we can go to college; but if we cannot have the advantage of
formal education we need not resign ourselves to ignorance.[4]

Most young people, however, will think of Greek, Latin, French, and
German as difficult and “learned” mysteries accessible only to the
fortunate who can go to the higher schools, and of use only to those
who intend to enter scientific and literary professions. If I say
that with no knowledge of any language but English you can teach
yourself any other language well enough to read it, I hope you will
not shake your head and say that such self-teaching is possible only
to extraordinary intellects. Many commonplace persons have learned
languages by reading them, with no equipment but a lexicon, a short
grammar, and an interesting text. Perhaps it is not fair on top of that
statement to cite the case of Elihu Burritt, for he was an exceptional
man. But as readers will learn from his excellent “Autobiography,” he
began his studies under very difficult circumstances; so that, taking
all things together, talent and conditions, many a young man can start
where he began and under no greater disadvantages. Burritt would have
gone some way on the road to learning even if his endowments had been
small. And with no genius but the genius of industry we can follow for
a little distance his democratic course.

Burritt was a blacksmith by trade. He had only such education as he
could get in a country academy, where his brother was the master. In
his leisure he studied mathematics and languages, and before he died
he had acquired a reading knowledge of fifty tongues and dialects,
ancient and modern. Yet he was not a self-absorbed man who shut himself
up in profitless culture. He became a world-wide apostle of peace.
The study of languages taught him that all men are brothers. If he
could learn fifty foreign languages, any of us can learn one, and
through that one we too shall understand that we are not an isolated
people, not the only people in the world. We shall meet in their native
tongue some great group of our brothers, the Germans, the French, the
Italians, learn their ideals and broaden our own. It is impossible to
learn Greek and Latin and not to feel how close we are to the peoples
of two thousand years ago. It is impossible to learn French or German
and keep in our hearts any of that contempt for “foreigners” which
ignorant and provincial people so stupidly cherish.

We shall arrive, too, through knowledge of another language at a
finer appreciation of our own language, its shades and distinctions,
its variety and power. We shall understand better the great English
writers, many of whom have known something of foreign literature and
refer in a familiar way to French and German and ancient classics, as
if they took for granted in their readers an acquaintance with the
literature of other nations.

How shall we go to work to learn foreign languages? The answer is as
simple as the prescription for reading English. Open a book written
in the foreign language and take each word in order through a whole
sentence. Then read that same sentence in a good translation. Then
write down all the words that seem to be nouns and all the words that
seem to be verbs. After that read the sections in the grammar about
verbs and nouns. The other parts of speech will take care of themselves
for a while. Then try another sentence. I know one young person who
read through a French book and got at its meaning by guessing at the
words and then returning over those which appeared oftenest and which,
of course, were the commonest. It is possible by a comparison of the
many uses of the same word to squeeze some meaning out of it. The
dictionary and the grammar will give the rest.

The foreign book stores, the publishers of text books, and the
purveyors of home teaching methods that are advertised in the more
reputable journals offer language books that are of real assistance.
The scope of this Guide does not admit any detailed instruction in
the methods of learning foreign languages. I can only insist that
with a few books and perseverance anyone can learn, not to speak,
perhaps not to write, but to read a strange tongue. And I say to the
boy or the girl who is going to the high school that not to take the
courses in Greek, Latin, French and German is to throw away a precious
opportunity. Upon the grounding of those few years in school, the
young receptive years, what a knowledge of languages one can build!
The notion, all too prevalent, that foreign languages, especially
Greek and Latin, are of no use to the boy or the girl who is going
“right into business,” is one of the dullest fallacies with which a
hard-working practical people ever blinded its soul. Playing the piano
and learning to sing, nay, even going to church, are of no use in
business. But who will be so foolish as to devote his whole life to
business? Burritt, the blacksmith boy, taught himself languages. The
high-school boy who is going to be a blacksmith can begin to study
languages before he picks up the tools of his bread-winning labor. If
this seems like the vain idealism of a bookish person, let me make an
appeal to your patriotism. Do you know that this land of opportunity
and prosperity is not developing so many fundamentally educated
men and women as we should expect from our vast system of public
schools and our many universities? One reason is that we have so many
bread-and-butter Americans who allow their boys and girls to stay away
from those classes in Greek and Latin and French and German which our
high schools provide at such great cost to the generous taxpayer. All
we lack in America is the will to use the good things we have provided
for us.

Well, we who are interested in the reading of good books will
make up our minds to get by hook or crook a little taste of some
language besides English. If we truly care for poetry we shall try
to read Vergil and Homer and Dante and Goethe. To become gradually
familiar with one great foreign poet, so that we know him as we know
Shakespeare, is to conquer a whole new world.

The easiest books to read in a foreign tongue are prose fictions, in
which the interest of the story spurs the reader on and makes him eager
for the meanings of the words. Text-book publishers issue inexpensive
editions of modern French and German fictions, which are, of course,
selected by the editors with a view to their fitness for young readers.
The French or German book which has become a recognized classic in
its native land and is considered by editors of school books to be a
good classroom text is likely to have universal literary qualities,
simplicity, purity of style, and right-mindedness. I find in admirable
inexpensive texts representative stories by Dumas, Zola, George Sand,
Halévy, Daudet, Pierre Loti, Balzac, Hugo, About, and other French
masters, and by Freytag, Baumbach, Sudermann, and Heyse among modern
German writers. French and German drama and history lie but a step
beyond. I, for one, have read more of these school editions of foreign
classics since I left school than when they were part of school-day
duty, and I am still grateful for the convenient notes and lists of
hard words. As one with only an imperfect reading knowledge of foreign
languages, I can testify with the right degree of authority to the
pleasure of the ordinary person in reading unfamiliar tongues. If one
has a fair grounding of Latin, the exploration of Italian and Spanish
is a tour through a cleared and easy country. With Professor Norton’s
wonderful prose translation and with the text of Dante in the _Temple
Classics_, where the English version faces the Italian, page for page,
one can read Dante as one would read Chaucer. And there could be no
better way to learn the difference between prose and poetry than to
turn now and again to Longfellow’s truly poetic translation and feel
how his verse lifts in places to something that the prose cannot quite
attain.

If we are not persuaded that our soul’s good depends on a knowledge
of foreign languages, we can make the acquaintance of the classics of
other nations in the best English renderings. Our greatest book, the
King James Bible, is a translation, so great a translation that in
point of style it is said by some critical scholars to be better than
its Greek and Hebrew originals. In general it is true that translation
falls below the original or radically changes its character. Until
the nineteenth century, when the scholars of our race began to give
us literal translations of the classics, which although “literal”
are still idiomatic English, translators in our tongue have been, as
a rule, willful conquerors who dominated the native spirit of their
originals with the overwhelming power of the English language and
spirit. They anglicized the foreign masterpiece so that its own father
would not recognize it. The result was often, as in Pope’s “Iliad,” a
new English classic but not a good pathway to the house of the foreign
poet.

Pope’s “Iliad” is a “classic” but it is poor Homer and not the best of
Pope. His genius is much better expressed in “The Rape of the Lock.”
And Homer’s genius is much better preserved for us in the simple prose
of Leaf, Myers, Butcher, and Lang. Professor G. H. Palmer’s “Odyssey”
is so good that no translator hereafter has a right to plead as excuse
for the failure of his version of any classic that “the English
language will not do it.” Matthew Arnold’s essay “On Translating Homer”
will stimulate the reader’s interest in the art of translation and help
bring him near to the Greek spirit. But this essay goes into subtleties
which may baffle the beginner. Any beginner, old enough to read at all,
can read Professor Palmer’s “Odyssey.” Many books of Greek stories and
legends of the heroes have been prepared for young readers. “Old Greek
Stories” by C. H. Hanson, or A. J. Church’s books of Greek life and
story, together with Bulfinch’s “Age of Fable,” will initiate one into
the Homeric mysteries.[5]

After the reader has advanced far enough to be interested in
philosophy, he will wish to read Epictetus and Plato. Jowett’s “Plato”
is one of the great translations of the nineteenth century. The reader
of Browning will not omit his noble, if somewhat difficult translation
of the “Agamemnon” of Æschylus. From the early Elizabethans to the
late Victorians the works of the English poets are starred with bits
from the Latin and Greek poets. One of the finest of translations from
the Greek is the “Theocritus” of Charles Stuart Calverley, the English
poet, who loved all things beautiful and enjoyed all things absurd.
Calverley’s translations from the classics and his delicious burlesques
and parodies will give one a new sense of how close together the
different moods of literature may lie in the same heart, both the heart
of the poet and the heart of the reader.

If an artistic translation of a foreign work has not been made or is
not easily accessible, a literal translation is of great service to the
casual reader. Even in the preparation of lessons in Latin and Greek
a literal translation, honestly used, helps one to learn the original
language and extends one’s English vocabulary. The reason there is a
ban upon the “pony” in school is that people ride it too hard and do
not learn to walk on their own feet. Out of school we can get much from
literal renderings of the classics, such as are to be found in the
cheap series of _Handy Literal Translations_, published by Hinds & Co.
Their fault is that they are printed in tryingly small type, but this
is a defect due to their merits of compactness and low cost.

The best translation of Vergil is Conington’s prose version, which has
become an English classic. The introduction is one of the best essays
on translating. There are several renderings of Vergil into English
verse. Dryden’s is the best known, and is of interest to the reader
of English principally because Dryden did it. He brought to Vergil
somewhat the same ideals of translation and the same kind of skill that
Pope brought to the “Iliad.” William Morris’s version is probably the
most fluent and poetic of modern translations of Vergil into English
verse.

The Latin poet who has been most often translated, and by the greatest
variety of talent, is Horace, whom our forefathers thought that every
gentleman should be able to quote. The accomplished translator likes
to match his skill against the clever Roman, to render his light
philosophy, his keen phrase, his beautiful brevity. The American will
like the free and joyous “Echoes from the Sabine Farm,” by the late
Eugene Field and his brother, Mr. Roswell Field, a book that must have
made the shade of Horace inquire appreciatively in what part of the
world Chicago is “located.”

Modern literature in all countries has attracted the readers of other
countries, and the work of translation is going on continuously. Not
only the great foreign classics of the last three hundred years, but a
host of lesser writers on the continent of Europe have made their way
into English. At the beginning of the nineteenth century there was a
new interest in German literature and philosophy--indeed, there was a
new German literature. Goethe was translated by Sir Walter Scott and
others. Coleridge translated Schiller’s “Wallenstein.” Carlyle made
a number of translations from German romance, among them a glowing
version of Goethe’s “Wilhelm Meister,” which, in part, suggested his
own strange masterpiece, “Sartor Resartus.” Bayard Taylor’s poetic
version of “Faust” is of interest to the American reader and is no mean
representation of the original.

Hugo and Dumas are as well known to us as Scott and Dickens. Who
has not read “Les Miserables” and “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” and
“The Toilers of the Sea”; “The Count of Monte Cristo” and “The Three
Musketeers”? “The Devil’s Pool,” “Mauprat” and “The Little Fadette” by
George Sand have been English literature these many years. So, too,
have “Eugénie Grandet” and “Le Père Goriot” by Balzac, the first of the
great French realists whose work has come to us directly in translation
and indirectly through the English and American writers whom they have
influenced.

As for later French fiction we can trust to the taste of English
translators, as we can to the judgment of the editors of the school
texts, to give us the best, that is, the best for us. The finest of
Maupassant comes to us politely introduced by Mr. Henry James in “The
Odd Number.” Bourget, Daudet, Pierre Loti, Mérimée, Halévy, the great
Belgian poet, Maeterlinck, who belongs to French literature, Anatole
France in his beautiful story, “The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard,” the
poet Rostand--these and others we have naturalized in English. It is
to France that we turn for the best criticism, and the reader who gets
far enough to be interested in that branch of literature will find that
many of the critics of our race have been pupils of the French critics
from Sainte-Beuve to Brunetière and Hennequin.

Other countries besides France, Germany, and England have produced
literature which has crossed the boundaries of the nations and become
the possession of the world. The Russian novel is, perhaps, the most
powerful that the nineteenth century has seen, but the American reader
may as well leave it until he has read a great deal of English
fiction. Then he will find that Turgenieff, Tolstoi, Dostoevski are
giants in a giant nation. Poland has one writer who is known to English
readers, Sienkiewicz, whose “Quo Vadis” and “With Fire and Sword” are
among the great novels of our age. I should recommend that admirers
of “Ben Hur” read “Quo Vadis” and get a lesson in the difference
between a masterpiece and a pleasant book that is very much less than a
masterpiece. Readers who think there is some special virtue in American
humor--and no doubt there is--ought to know at least one of the great
books of Spain, “Don Quixote.” Spanish has become an important language
to us who are learning about our neighbors, “the other Americans,”
and are trying to wake up our lagging trade relations with them and
our backward sympathies. The young man going into business will find
some good chances open to him if he knows Spanish, and, what is
perhaps quite as important, he will find that Spain, too, has a modern
literature.

We cannot know all foreign literatures, but we can know at least one.
Whether we visit in spirit Italy or Norway or Spain or Russia, we shall
be learning the great lesson of literature, that our brothers the world
over are doing and thinking and hoping the same things that we are.
Reading foreign books[6] is the cheapest and perhaps the wisest kind of
travel, for the body rests while the mind goes abroad.


FOOTNOTES:

[4] See also page 241.

[5] See also the discussion of Chapman, pp. 245-8 of this Guide.

[6] Books in foreign languages and English translations will be found
in their proper place in the lists of fiction, poetry, etc.




CHAPTER XI

THE PRESS OF TO-DAY


If we were guiding an intelligent stranger from another planet through
our busy world, before what institution should we pause with greatest
anxiety to explain to our alien comrade its meaning, its value?
Perhaps before the church, yet when we remembered that the Bible and
other works of religion and poetry are in our homes, we could not
bring ourselves to tell our companion that the church is the heart,
the indispensable fountain of our religious life. The school then?
Maybe that, yet Knowledge spends in the school but relatively few
hours of her day-long ministrations. We might wax eloquent before the
hospitals, but they are only repairing some of the damages which man
and nature have inflicted upon a small part of the race, and it is
the healthy major portion of humanity that carries on the life of the
world and does whatever is worth doing. It would be simple to explain
the thundering factories whose din drowns the voice of the expositor,
to tell how in yonder building are made the machines that cut and
thresh the wheat that feeds the world, and how in the building beyond
are made the cars that bring the wheat from the fields to the teeming
towns. All these institutions are wonderful, all are essential in our
life. Yet greater than any, more difficult to explain, inspiring and
disheartening, grinding good and evil, is the press, from which our
visitor could see streaming forth thousands of tons of paper blackened
with the imprint of little types.

The stranger could see that. We should have to make it clear to him
that those types are turning over once a year almost all that man has
ever known and thought. The contemporary press is engaged in three
kinds of activity: the reprinting of old books, the printing of new
ones, and the printing of the magazines, periodicals, newspapers, and
other communications relating to the conduct of daily business.

The first activity, the printing of old books, is an unmixed blessing.
Every book, great or small, that the world has found worth preserving
is continuously revived and redistributed to our generation. Never
before were the classics of the ages so cheap, so accessible to the
common man.

Toward the second product of the whirling presses, the books of to-day,
our attitude may easily become too censorious or too complacent. It is
the fashion to slander the productions of one’s own age and recall with
a sigh the good old days when there were giants. But in those good old
days it was fashionable, too, to underrate or ignore the living and
praise the dead. When the Elizabethan age was waning but not vanished,
Ben Jonson wrote: “Now things daily fall, wits grow downward, and
eloquence grows backward.” And yet Milton, the greatest poet after
Shakespeare, was even then a young man and had not done his noblest
work. A century later Pope wrote:

    Be thou the first true merit to befriend;
    His praise is lost who stays till all commend.
    Short is the date, alas, of modern rhymes,
    And ’tis but just to let them live betimes.
    No longer now the golden age appears
    When Patriarch-wits surviv’d a thousand years:
    Now length of Fame (our second life) is lost,
    And bare three score is all even that can boast;
    Our sons their fathers’ failing language see,
    And such as Chaucer is shall Dryden be.

But Chaucer is more alive now than he was in Pope’s day, and both
Dryden and Pope are brightly modern in diction if not in thought.
Pope’s idea is not so much that his contemporaries are unworthy of
long life as that changes in taste and language will soon make their
work obsolete. He pleads for his contemporaries, yet like many another
critic he is _laudator temporis acti_, a praiser of times past and
done. His injunction that we befriend and commend our neighbor’s merit
before it speedily perishes is generous but fails to recognize that
merit, true merit, does not die. This is certainly true in our time
when books are so easily manifolded and come into so many hands that
there is little likelihood of a real poet’s work being accidentally
annihilated, or failing to find a reader somewhere in the world.

In the nineteenth century pessimism about current literary productions
was almost chronic, at least among professional critics. The Edinburgh
Reviewers and the other Scotch terrier, Thomas Carlyle, set the whole
century to growling at itself. Thoreau, with a humorous parenthesis to
the effect that it is permissible to slander one’s own time, says that
Elizabethan writers--and he seems to be speaking not of the poets but
the prose writers--have a greater vigor and naturalness than the more
modern, and that a quotation from an Elizabethan in a modern writer is
like a green bough laid across the page. Stevenson says we are fine
fellows but cannot write like Hazlitt (there is no reason why we should
write like Hazlitt, or like anybody else in particular). Emerson,
tolerant and generous toward his contemporaries, looks askance at new
books, implies with an ambiguous “if” that “our times are sterile
in genius,” and lays down as a practical rule, “Never read any book
that is not a year old,”--which being translated means, “Encourage
literature by starving your authors.”

As we have said, most of the great authors are dead because most of
the people ever born in this world are dead. And it is natural for
bookmen to glance about their libraries, review the dignified backs of
a hundred classics, and then, looking the modern world in the face,
say, “Can any of you fellows do as well as these great ones?” To be
sure, one age cannot rival the selected achievements of a hundred ages.
But the Spirit of Literature is abroad in our garish modern times; she
has been continuously occupied for at least three centuries in every
civilized country in the world. And, as Pope pleads, let us welcome the
labors of those whom the Spirit of Literature brushes with her wing.

So far as one can judge, a very small part of contemporaneous writing
has literary excellence in any degree. But a similarly small portion
of the writing of any age has had lasting excellence; and more men and
women, more kinds of men and women, are to-day expressing themselves in
print than ever in the world before. Since no one person has to read
many books, the world is not unduly burdened with them; it can read,
classify, and reject or preserve all that the presses are capable of
putting forth. “The trash with which the press now groans” was foolish
cant a hundred years ago, when Jane Austen satirically quoted it.[7]
And it is more threadbare now than it was then. There are alive to-day
a goodly company of competent writers of novels; I could name ten. I
believe, too, that there are genuine poets, though we do not dare name
young poets until they are dead. History and biography are, regarded
as a collective institution, in flourishing state, though, to be sure,
the work of art in those departments of literature as in poetry and
fiction, appears none too frequently. It is our part to join in the
work of that great critic, the World, encourage the good and discourage
the bad, and help make the best book the “best seller.”

It would be foolish to hope for that ideal condition in which only
authors of ability should write books. “Were angels to write, I fancy
we should have but few folios.” But writing is a human affair, and
human labor is necessarily wasteful. We have to endure the printing of
a hundred poor books and we have to support a score of inferior writers
in order to get one good book and give one talented writer a part of
his living. Thousands of machines are built and thrown away before
the Wrights make one that will fly, and they could not make theirs if
other men had not tried and in large part failed, bequeathing them a
little experience. A hundred men for a hundred years contributed to the
making of Bell’s telephone. We do not grudge the wasted machines, the
broken apparatus in the laboratory. So, too, when hundreds of minor
poets print their little books and suffer heartache and disappointment
for the sake of the one volume of verse that shows genius, we need
not groan amid the whir of the presses; we need only contemplate with
sympathy and understanding the pathetic losses and brave gains of human
endeavor. Numberless books must be born and die in order that the one
or two may live. We shall try to ignore the minor versifier as gently
as possible, to suppress the cheap novelist as firmly as we can, and
give our dollar for the good book when we think we have found it.

The third part of the printed matter published from day to day,
periodicals and magazines and newspapers, presents a complex problem.
It is in place for us to say a word about it, for this is avowedly
a guide to reading and not a guide to literature, and most of us
spend, properly, a good third of our reading time over magazines and
newspapers. Much depends on our making ourselves not only intelligent
readers of books but intelligent readers of periodicals and papers.

The magazine industry in America is colossal, and its chief support is
that amazing business institution, American advertising. The public
pays a big tax on flour, shoes, clothes, paint, and every other
commodity in order that advertisers may pay for space in periodicals
and newspapers. The periodicals and newspapers, in turn, pay writers
from a fiftieth to a twentieth of the income from advertising in order
to make the advertising medium interesting enough for people to buy it.

In this the magazine manufacturers are on the whole successful.
Perhaps there are sages and seers who can live content with bound
books and prefer that those books should be at least fifty years old.
I know of one man, a constant reader of poetry and philosophy, who
tried the experiment of retiring to his library and stopping all his
subscriptions to the current periodicals. The experiment was an utter
failure, because he was a man of active intelligence, and because,
in truth, the magazines, many of them, are very good. No less a
philosopher than Professor William James said in a recent article:
“_McClure’s Magazine_, _The American Magazine_, _Collier’s Weekly_
and in its fashion, _The World’s Work_, constitute together a real
popular university.... It would be a pity if any future historian were
to have to write words like these: ‘By the middle of the twentieth
century the higher institutions of learning had lost all influence
over public opinion in the United States. But the mission of raising
the tone of democracy which they had proved themselves so lamentably
unfitted to exert, was assumed with rare enthusiasm and prosecuted
with extraordinary skill and success by a new educational power; and
for the clarification of their human preferences, the people at large
acquired the habit of resorting exclusively to the guidance of certain
private literary ventures, commonly designated in the market by the
affectionate name of ten-cent magazines.’ Must not we of the colleges
see to it that no historian shall ever say anything like this?”

The possible failure, here implied, of universities to lead in the
subjects which they profess to study has already become actual in the
departments of English literature. Of this we shall say something in
the next chapter.

It is, however, the other side of the matter that is important. Our
best magazines are vital: they are enlisting the services of every kind
of thinker and teacher and man of experience, and they are printing
as good fiction and verse as they can get; certainly they are not
willfully printing inferior work. But it is not the fiction or the
verse in the magazines that is of greatest moment, even when it is
good. The value of the magazine lies in the miscellaneous contributions
on science, politics, medicine, and current affairs, which seem to me
of continuously good substance from month to month. And the literary
quality of these articles (the words I quoted from Professor James are
from a fine article printed in a popular magazine, _McClure’s_) is, on
the whole, just as high as the average in the old _Edinburgh Review_,
through which Sydney Smith, Lord Jeffrey, and others, with stinging and
brilliant essays, helped to reform that terribly brutal England of the
early nineteenth century.

It is easy to find fault with the magazines. You may say that the
_Atlantic Monthly_ is pseudo-literary and seems to be living on
the sweepings of a New England culture of which all the important
representatives died twenty years ago. You may say that the _Nation_
often sounds as if it were written by the more narrow-minded sort of
college professor. You may say that the _Outlook_ is permeated by
a weak religiosity. All the same, if you see on a man’s table the
_Atlantic Monthly_, the _Nation_, and the _Outlook_, and the copies
look as if they had been read, you may be reasonably sure that that man
appreciates good writing and has a just-minded view of public questions.

Of the lighter, more “entertaining” magazines there are, from an
ideal point of view, too many, and the large circulation of some of
the sillier ones indicates what we all know and need not moralize
about--that there are millions of uneducated people who want something
to read. It is, however, a matter for congratulation that some of the
best magazines, _McClure’s_, _Collier’s_, _The Youth’s Companion,
Everybody’s_, have large circulations, and that our respectable and
well-bred old friends, _Scribner’s_, _Harper’s_, the _Century_, are
national institutions.[8]

It is difficult to understand how the American magazine and the
American newspaper are products of the same nation; the magazine is
so honest and so able, the newspaper so dishonest and so ignorant
except in its genius for making money and sending chills up the back.
We will not waste our time by turning the rest of this chapter into
an article demanding a “reform” of the newspapers, but in the spirit
of a conscientious guide of young readers we will make two or three
observations.

The advertising departments of the American newspaper, with few
exceptions, differ from the advertising departments of all reputable
magazines, in that the newspaper proprietors take no responsibility
for the character of the advertisements. The magazines reject all
advertisements that the managers know to be fraudulent. The newspapers
do not reject them. Let the reader draw his own conclusions as to
the trustworthiness of his daily paper as a business institution and
a purveyor of the truth. When we have a generation of Americans who
understand the business dishonesty of the newspaper and what it implies
about the character of the news and the editorials, the newspapers will
be better in all departments. Meanwhile, all our writing about the low
quality of our daily press will have little effect.

In the matter of journalistic honesty in the news and editorial
departments, let us understand this: With few exceptions, American
newspapers are so irresponsible that no unsupported statement appearing
in them is to be counted on as the truth or as a fair expression of
what the men in the editorial offices believe to be the truth. Of
course, much of every daily paper is true, because the proprietors
have no motive in most cases for telling anything untrue. In order
to give some weight to these opinions I may say that for a number of
years I was an exchange editor and read newspapers from all parts of
America. Also, for a number of years I acted as private secretary to a
distinguished person whose name is often in the newspapers, and whose
position is such that no editor can have any motive, except the desire
to print a “story,” for connecting the name with any untrue idea. From
a collection of fifty clippings made from American newspapers in a
period of two years I find over thirty that are mainly incorrect and
contain ideas invented at the reporter’s or the editor’s desk; more
than ten that are entire fabrications; and five that are not only
untrue, but damaging to the peace of mind of the subject and other
interested persons. And under all this is not a touch of malice, for
toward that person the entire press and public are friendly. Imagine
the lies that are told about a person to whom the editors (or, rather,
the owners) are indifferent or unfriendly!

When one considers the energy and enterprise of the newspaper, it is
difficult to understand why there is not more literary ability, at
least of the humbler kind, in the news columns, the reviews and the
editorial comments. One reason is, perhaps, that the magazines take all
the best journalistic ability, so far as that ability consists in skill
in the use of language; any journalist or writer on special subjects
prints his work in the magazines if he can, and the newspapers get what
is left. Editorial writing is at such a low pitch that there are only
two or three real editorial pages in the daily press of the nation.
The reporting is often clever and quite as often without conscience.
The machinery for gathering world news is amazingly well organized.
Other kinds of ability are abundant in the newspaper office; and it
is a natural economic fact that the most debased papers, making the
most money, can hire the most talented men--and debauch them; while
the more conscientious paper, struggling in competition with its rich
and dishonest rivals, cannot afford to pay for the best editors and
reporters.

If the rising generation will understand this and grow up with an
increasing distrust of the newspaper, the newspaper will reform in
obedience to the demand of the public, the silent demand expressed by
the greater circulation of good papers and the failure of these that
are degrading and degraded.

We called in the opinions of one philosopher, Professor James, to
support our view of the American magazine. Let us summon another
philosopher to corroborate in part our view of the newspapers, to show
that the foregoing opinions are not (as some newspapers would probably
affirm if they noticed the matter at all), the complaints of a crank
who does not understand “practical” newspaper work. Our philosopher
will confirm, too, the belief of this Guide that the ethics of the
newspaper is of importance to the young reader. The newspaper is ours.
We must have it; it renders indispensable service to all departments of
our life, business, education, philanthropy, politics. We cannot turn
our backs on it; we cannot in lofty scorn reject the newsboy at the
door. It is for us to understand the constitution and methods of the
daily press and not be duped by its grosser treacheries as our fathers
have been. I quote from _The Outlook_ a letter from Professor George
Herbert Palmer, whose name will be found elsewhere in this book as
philosopher and translator of the “Odyssey.”

  “_To the Editor of ‘The Outlook’_:

 “SIR: May I make use of your columns for a personal explanation
 and also to set forth certain traits in our press and people which
 manifest themselves, I believe, in an equal degree in no other country?

 “The personal facts are these: On June 16th I delivered a Commencement
 address at a girls’ college in Boston, taking for my subject the
 common objections to the higher education of women, objections
 generally rather felt than formulated by hesitating mothers. Five were
 mentioned: the danger to health, to manners, to marriage, to religion,
 and to companionship with parents in the home. These I described from
 the parents’ point of view, and then pointed out the misconceptions
 on which I believed them to rest. In speaking of manners, I said that
 a mother often fears that attention to study may make her daughter
 awkward, keep her unfamiliar with the general world, and leave her
 unfit for mixed society. To which I replied that in the rare cases
 where intellectual interests do for a time overshadow the social, we
 may well bear in mind the relative difficulties of subsequent repair.
 A girl who has had only social interests before twenty-one does not
 usually gain intellectual ones afterwards; while the ways of the world
 are rapidly acquired by any young woman of brains. To illustrate, I
 told of a strong student of Radcliffe who had lived much withdrawn
 during her course there, alarming her uncollegiate parents by her
 slender interest in social functions. At graduation they pressed her
 to devote a year to balls and dinners and to what they regarded as the
 occult art of manners. She came to me for counsel, and I advised her
 to accede to their wishes. ‘Flirt hard, M.,’ said I, ‘and show that a
 college girl is equal to whatever is required of her.’ This was the
 only allusion to the naughty topic which my speech, an hour in length,
 contained.

 “That evening one of the ‘yellowest’ of the Boston papers printed a
 report of my ‘Address on Flirtation,’ and the next day a reporter came
 from the same paper requesting an interview. The interview I refused,
 saying that I had given no such address and I wished my name kept
 altogether out of print. The following Sunday, however, the bubble
 was fully blown, the paper printing a column of pretended interview,
 generously adorned with headlines and quotation marks, setting forth
 in gay colors my ‘advocacy of flirtation.’

 “And now the dirty bubble began to float. Not being a constant reader
 of this particular paper, I knew nothing of its mischief until a week
 had gone by. Then remonstrances began to be sent to me from all parts
 of the country, denouncing my hoary frivolity. From half the states
 of the Union they came, and in such numbers that few days of the past
 month have been free from a morning insult. My mail has been crowded
 with solemn or derisive editorials, with distressed letters, abusive
 postal cards, and occasionally the leaflet of some society for the
 prevention of vice, its significant passages marked. During all this
 hullabaloo I have been silent. The story was already widespread when
 my attention was first called to it. It struck me then as merely a
 gigantic piece of summer silliness, arguing emptiness of the editorial
 mind. I felt, too, how easily a man makes himself ridiculous in
 attempting to prove that he is not a fit subject for ridicule, and
 how in the long run character is its own best vindication. I should
 accordingly prefer to remain silent still; but the story, like all
 that touches on questions of sex, has shown a strange persistency. My
 friends are disquieted. Harvard is defamed. Reports of my depravity
 have lately been sent to me from English and French papers, and in a
 recent number of _Life_ I appear in a capital cartoon, my utterance
 being reckoned one of the principal events of the month. Perhaps,
 then, it is as well to say that no such incident has occurred, and
 that now, when all of us have had our laugh, the racket had better
 cease.

 “But such persistent pursuit of an unoffending person throws into
 strong relief four defects in our newspapers, and especially in the
 attitude of our people toward them. In the first place, the plan of
 reporting practiced here is a mistaken one, and is adopted, so far
 as I know, nowhere else on earth. Our papers rarely try to give an
 ordered outline of an address. They either report verbatim, or more
 usually the reporter is expected to gather a lot of taking phrases,
 regardless of connection. While these may occasionally amuse, I
 believe that readers turn less and less to printed reports of
 addresses. Serious reporting of public speech is coming to an end. It
 would be well if it ended altogether, so impossible is it already to
 learn from the newspapers what a man has been saying.

 “Of the indifference to truth in the lower class of our papers,
 their vulgarity, intrusions into private life, and eagerness at all
 hazards to print something startling, I say little, because these
 characteristics are widely known and deplored. It apparently did not
 occur to any of my abusers to look up the evidence of my folly.
 I dare say it was the very unlikelihood of the tale which gave it
 currency. I was in general known to be a quiet person, with no liking
 for notoriety, a teacher of one of the gravest subjects in a dignified
 university. I had just published a largely circulated biography,
 presenting an exalted ideal of marriage. It struck the press of the
 country as a diverting thing to reverse all this in a day, to picture
 me as favoring loose relations of the sexes, and to attribute to me
 buffoonery from which every decent man recoils.

 “Again, our people seem growing incapable of taking a joke--or rather
 of taking anything else. The line which parts lightness from reality
 is becoming blurred. My lively remark has served as the subject for
 portentous sermonizing, while the earnest appeal made later in my
 address to look upon marriage seriously, as that which gives life its
 best meaning, has been either passed by in silence or mentioned as
 giving additional point to my nonsense. The passion for facetiousness
 is taking the heart out of our people and killing true merriment. The
 ‘funny column’ has so long used marriage and its accompaniments as
 a standing jest that it is becoming difficult to think of it in any
 other way, and the divorce court appears as merely the natural end of
 the comedy.

 “The part of this affair, however, which should give us gravest
 concern is the lazy credulity of the public. They know the
 recklessness of journalism as clearly as do I, on whom its dirty
 water has been poured. Yet readers trust, and journal copies journal,
 as securely as if the authorities were quite above suspicion. Once
 started by the sensational press, my enormities were taken up with
 amazing swiftness by the respectable and religious papers, and by many
 thousands of their readers. It is this easy trust on the part of the
 public which perpetuates newspaper mendacity. What inducement has a
 paper to criticise its statements when it knows they will never be
 criticised by its readers? Nothing in all this curious business has
 surprised me more than the ease with which the American people can be
 hoaxed. One would expect decent persons to put two and two together,
 and not to let a story gain acceptance from them unless it had some
 relation to the character of him of whom it was told. I please myself
 with thinking that if a piece of profanity were reported of President
 Taft I should think no worse of President Taft, but very badly and
 loudly of that paper. But, perhaps I, too, am an American. Perhaps I,
 too, might rest satisfied with saying, ‘I saw it in print.’ Only then
 I should be unreasonable to complain of bad newspapers.

                                         “G. H. PALMER.”


FOOTNOTES:

[7] See page 42.

[8] They seem to be international institutions if one is to believe the
story of the English lady who, comparing the United States unfavorably
with her own country, said to an American: “You have nothing equal to
_our_ _Century_, _Harper’s_, and _Scribner’s_.” Those magazines publish
English editions.




CHAPTER XII

THE STUDY OF LITERATURE


In our age of free libraries and cheap editions of good books anyone
who has time and disposition may become not merely a reader of
literature, but a student of literature. The difference is not great,
perhaps not important; it seems to be only a matter of attitude and
method. The reader opens any book that falls in his way or to which
he is led for any reason, tries a page or two of it, and continues or
not, at pleasure. The student opens a book which he has deliberately
sought and brings to it not only the tastes and moods of the ordinary
reader, but a determination to know the book, however much or little
it may please him. He is impelled not only to know the book, with his
critical faculties more or less consciously awake, but to know the
circumstances under which the book was written, and its relation to
other books. One may read “Hamlet” ten times and know much of it by
heart and still not be a _student_ of “Hamlet,” much less a student of
Shakespeare. The student feels it necessary to know the other plays
of Shakespeare, some of the other Elizabethan dramatists, a little of
the history and biography of Shakespeare’s time, and something, too,
of the best critical literature that “Hamlet” has inspired in the
past two centuries. The study of literature implies order and method
in the selection of books, and orderly reading in turn implies enough
seriousness and willful application to turn the act of reading, in
part, from play to work.

Well, then, it is better to be a student of literature than a mere
reader. Ideally that is true; if there were years enough in a human
life we should like to be students of everything under the sun. But the
conditions of life limit the mere reader on one side and the student
on the other, and it is a question which one is ultimately richer in
mind. A mere reader will read “Hamlet” until he can almost imagine
himself standing on the stage able to speak the lines of any part. The
student of literature will read “Hamlet” thoroughly, investigate its
real or supposed relation to the rest of the Shakespearian plays, toil
through a large volume of learned notes and opinions, read fifty other
Elizabethan tragedies and a half dozen volumes on the life and works
of Shakespeare. He is on the way to becoming a student of Shakespeare.
But while he is struggling with the learned notes, the mere reader
is reading, say, Henley’s poems; while the student is reading the
lesser plays of Shakespeare, the mere reader is enjoying Browning’s
tragedies; while the student of “Hamlet” is making the acquaintance of
fifty tragedies by Chapman, Beaumont and Fletcher, Jonson, Marlowe,
Webster--less than ten of which are masterpieces--the idle reader is
wandering through Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy,” ten modern novels, the
seventh book of “Paradise Lost” (that noble Chant of Creation), a
beautiful new edition of the poems of George Herbert, and some quite
unrelated bits of prose and verse that happen to attract his eye. Which
of the two has pursued the happier, wiser course? Each has spent his
time well, and each, if there were more time, might profitably follow
the other’s course in addition to his own. Intensive, orderly reading,
like that of the _student_, tends to make the mind methodical and
certainly furnishes it with a coherent body of related ideas on which
to meditate. Extensive reading, such as we assume the _reader’s_ will
be, seems to engender superficiality, and yet such is the nature of
books and human thought that scattered reading may disclose unexpected
and vital relations of idea. Greater effort of will is required to keep
the student on his narrower course, and effort of will is profitable
to the spirit. On the other hand, the mind is likely to have keener
appetite for what it meets on a discursive course, and it assimilates
and absorbs more exhaustively what it approaches with natural, unforced
interest. “It is better,” says Johnson, “when a man reads from
immediate inclination.”

It would be educational anarchy to depreciate orderly intensive
study of any subject, and we shall presently consider some helpful
introductions to the methodical study of literature. But I believe that
human nature and human conditions favor the unmethodical reader, and
that he, on the whole, discovers the best uses of books in the world
as it is. For in the world as it is, we have in adult life thirty,
forty, fifty years in which to read books. If we consider everything a
book from the little volume which occupies half an hour to the Bible
which cannot be read through once intelligently in under six months,
we see that three books a week is a liberal number for an assiduous
reader. So that in a lifetime one cannot expect to know more than five
or six thousand books. Five thousand, or two thousand, or one thousand
are plenty for a life of wisdom and enjoyment. The five thousand or
the one thousand books of the discursive reader are likely to be at
least as good a collection as the five thousand or the one thousand of
the student of literature. Reader and student are both restricted to
a small picking from the vineyard of books. The ordinary reader will
have spent a third of his reading hours on books that have meant little
to him. The student will have spent a third of his time in digging
through sapless, fiberless volumes. But the free wandering reader is
not disturbed by the number of books he has read in vain or by the vast
number of interesting books he has not read at all; whereas the student
of literature is lured by his ideal of exhaustive knowledge to hurry
through books that he “ought to know,” and in desperation is tempted to
insincere pretensions.

In no class of readers does the tendency to unwarranted assumptions of
knowledge show more comically than in those advanced students of books
who are called Professors of English Literature. Properly speaking,
no one is a professor of literature except the man who can produce
something worth reading. But as the term is used it defines a class
of teachers who have spent much time and study, not as writers but as
readers of books, and who then set themselves up, or are set up in
spite of individual modesty by the artificial university systems, to
“teach” literature. The professional teacher of literature can know
only a limited number of books. And while he has been reading his
kind, his unprofessional neighbors, even his students, are reading
their kind. He knows some literature that they do not; they know some
literature that he does not. The chances are that the professor and
not the lay reader will have departed the farther from the true uses
of literature. It is possible to read a number of good books while the
professor is studying what another professor says in reply to a third
professor’s opinions about what Shakespeare meant in a certain passage.
The professor of literature seems to regard Shakespeare and other poets
as inspired children who need a grown person to interpret their baby
talk; whereas the lay reader takes it for granted that Shakespeare had
more or less definite ideas about what he wished to say and succeeded
in saying it with admirable clarity.

To be sure, a professor here and there may be found who is a live and
virile reader of poetry like the rest of us, and the faults of pedantry
and pretentious authority are not inevitable faults of the profession
as a whole. There is, however, one universal fault of the professional
teacher of literature which is imposed by the conditions of employment
in our universities and is subversive of the true purpose of colleges
and the true purposes of literature. One fundamental idea of a college
is to afford a certain number of scholarly men the means of livelihood
from college endowments in order that they may have time to devote to
books. The modern professor of literature seems to have so many duties
of administration and discipline that he has little time to read for
the sake of reading--which is the chief reason for reading at all. The
old idea of a university as a place where the few educated members of
society could retire for study and intellectual communion has passed
away, and the professor of literature is rather at a disadvantage in
the modern world where there are more educated persons outside the
universities than in them, and where the cultivated person of leisure,
reading literature by himself, can easily outstrip the professor.

Professor of literature? As well might there be a professor of Life,
or a professor of Love, or a professor of Wisdom. Literature is too
vast for anyone to profess it, excepting always him who can contribute
to it. Even if our professors of literature were a more capable class
of men, they would still be anomalous members of society, for they are
trying to do an anomalous thing, maintain themselves in authority on a
subject which is open to everybody in a world of books and libraries.
And they are working under conditions not only not helpful, but
distinctly unfavorable to a true knowledge and enjoyment of literature,
as compared with the conditions of the person of equal intelligence
outside the college.

My purpose is not so much to dispraise the literary departments
of universities as to praise a world which has grown so rich in
opportunities that the universities are no longer the unique leaders
in literature or the seats of the best knowledge about it. Our masters
are on the shelves and not in the colleges. (Carlyle, Emerson, and
Ruskin all said that, and it was said before them.) Without going to
college we can become students of literature, professors of literature,
if we have the talent and the will. I do not say or mean that we
should not go to college if we can. I mean that we can stay away from
college if we must and still be as wise and happy readers of books
as those bachelors of arts who have sat for four years or more under
“professors of literature.” If my advice were sought on this point, I
should advise every boy and girl to go to college if possible, but to
take few courses in English literature and English composition. One
great advantage of a college course is that it offers four years of
comparative leisure, of freedom from the day’s work of the breadwinner;
and in those four years the student, with a good library at hand,
can read for himself. I should advise the student to take courses in
foreign languages, history, economics, and the sciences, things which
can be taught in classrooms and laboratories and are usually taught by
experts. There is no need of listening to a professor of English who
discourses about Walter Scott and Shakespeare; we can read them without
assistance. Literature is a universal possession among people of
general intelligence. It is made, fostered, and enjoyed by men who are
not professors of literature in the meaningless sense; it is written
for and addressed to people who are not professors of literature; and
it is understood and appreciated, I dare affirm, by no intelligent,
cultivated class in the world less certainly, less directly, less
profitably than by professors of literature in the modern American
college.

Well, we may leave our little declaration of independence from those
who are supposed to be authorities in literature, and turning from
them not too disrespectfully, go our own way. Let us be readers
of literature. The study of literature will take care of itself.
We cannot expect to know as much about the sources of “Hamlet” as
Professor Puppendorf thinks he knows. Neither can we hope to bring as
much imagination to our reading as Lamb brought to his. But of the
two masters we shall follow Lamb, who was not a professor, nor even,
it seems, a student of literature, but only a reader. If we happen
to be interested in Professor Smith’s ideas of Milton, we can in
three or four hours read his handbook on the subject, or, better, the
other handbook from which he got his ideas. For the professors do not
keep their wisdom for their students in class; they live, in spite
of themselves, in a modern world and publish for the general reader
all the knowledge they have--and a little more. We can follow the
professors, if we choose, in the libraries. But probably there will be
more wisdom and happiness in following Lamb or Stevenson, or some other
reader who was not a professor; they tread a broader highway and never
forget what books are made for. We may well follow Dr. S. M. Crothers,
“The Gentle Reader,” who seems to have been enjoying books all his
life and still enjoys them, though he lives near a great university.
Another genial guide and counselor, whose company the younger
generation might well seek often, is Mr. Howells. He is a professor
of literature in the real sense, because he makes it. He is also a
reader whose enthusiasms are fresh and individual. Many of his recorded
impressions of contemporaneous books are buried in an obscure magazine,
and his reticence has its disadvantages in an age when too many inept
voices chatter about books. But he reads books and writes about them
because he likes them, and so his accounts of his reading are rich in
suggestion.

Most of the authentic professors of literature, that is, the men who
have produced literature, have been readers rather than students of
books. Keats, I am quite sure, had neither opportunity nor inclination
to make a formal study of books, even of the old poets from whom his
genius drew its sustenance. He seems not to have studied Homer or the
English translation by the Elizabethan poet, George Chapman. He calls
his sonnet “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer.” You see, he only
read it, only “looked into” it, just like an ordinary reader. But he
was not ordinary, he was a poet, and so he could write this of his
experience as a reader:

    Much have I travel’d in the realms of gold,
      And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
      Round many western islands have I been,
    Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
    Oft of one wide expanse had I been told,
      That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;
      Yet never did I breathe its pure serene
    Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:

    Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
      When a new planet swims into his ken;
    Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
      He stared at the Pacific--and all his men
    Looked at each other with a wild surmise--
      Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Something like that experience ambushes the road of any reader, the
most commonplace of us. We, too, can travel in the realms of gold.
Only three or four men are born in a century who could express the
experience so finely as that. But the breathless adventure can be ours,
even if we cannot write about it.

The great writers themselves are the best guides to one another,
for they have kept the reader’s point of view--they had too much
imagination, as a rule, to descend to any other point of view.
We conjecture that Shakespeare was an omnivorous reader. And so,
certainly, were Milton, Browning, Tennyson, Shelley, Carlyle, George
Eliot, Macaulay. Nearly all the great writers have been, of course,
life-long, assiduous students of the technical characteristics of
certain kinds of literature from which they were learning their art.
The poet must study the poets; the novelist must study the novelists.
But the creative artist is usually far from being a scientific or
methodical student of literature as it is laid out (suggestive words!),
in handbooks and courses. The nature of literature and the experience
of the makers of it seem to confirm us in the belief that books are to
be read, to be understood and enjoyed as they come to one’s hands, and
not jammed into text-book diagrams of periods and cycles and schools.
The great writers of our race, those obviously who know most about
literature, seem to have taken their books as they took life, just as
they happened to come. They were wanderers, not tourists. And though we
shall never see as much by the way as they did and have not the power
to travel so far, we can roam through “many goodly states and kingdoms”
and be sure of inspiring encounters, if only a small corner of our
nature is capable of being inspired.

But as travelers in lands of beauty and adventure may profitably spend
an hour a day in searching the guide books for facts about what they
have seen and directions for finding the most interesting places, so
the reader, without sacrificing his spirit of freedom, may well equip
himself with a few handbooks of literature. Suppose that Keats has
interested us in Chapman’s Homer. Let us find out who Chapman was and
when he lived. A fairly reliable book in which to seek for him is
Professor George Saintsbury’s “History of Elizabethan Literature.” It
is one of a series of histories in which the volume on “Early English
Literature” is by Mr. Stopford Brooke, and the volume on “English
Literature of the Eighteenth Century” is by Mr. Edmund Gosse. We find
in Saintsbury’s handbook ten pages of biography and criticism of
Chapman and extracts from his poetry. This is enough to give a little
notion of Chapman’s place in literature and to suggest to the ordinary
reader whether Chapman is a writer he will wish to know more fully. We
find among Mr. Saintsbury’s comments on Chapman the following:

“The splendid sonnet of Keats testifies to the influence which his
work long had on those Englishmen who were unable to read Homer in
the original. A fine essay of Mr. Swinburne’s has done, for the first
time, justice to his general literary powers, and a very ingenious
and, among such hazardous things, unusually probable conjecture of Mr.
Minto’s identifies him with the ‘rival poet’ of Shakespeare’s sonnets.
But these are adventitious claims to fame. What is not subject to
such deduction is the assertion that Chapman was a great Englishman
who, while exemplifying the traditional claim of great Englishmen to
originality, independence, and versatility of work, escaped at once
the English tendency to lack of scholarship, and to ignorance of
contemporary continental achievements, was entirely free from the fatal
Philistinism in taste and in politics, and in other matters, which has
been the curse of our race, was a Royalist, a lover, a scholar, and has
left us at once one of the most voluminous and peculiar collections of
work that stand to the credit of any literary man of his country.”

Here, in this paragraph, we stand neck-deep in the study of
literature, its exhilarating eddies of opinion, its mind-strengthening
difficulties, and also, we must confess, its harmless dangers and
absurdities. Let us run over Mr. Saintsbury’s sentences again and see
whither they take us.

Keats’s sonnet--we have just read that--which Mr. Saintsbury says,
testifies to the influence of Chapman for a long time on Englishmen who
could not read Greek, really does nothing of the sort. It testifies
only that Keats met Chapman, and the momentous meeting took place, in
point of fact, at a time when the interest in Elizabethan poetry was
reviving after a century that preferred Pope’s “Iliad” to Chapman’s.
Handbook makers sometimes go to sleep and make statements like that,
and it is just as well that they do, for their noddings tumble them
from their Olympian elevations to our level and help to make them
intelligible to the common run of mortals. The mention of Swinburne’s
essay is an interesting clue to follow. His recent death (1909) has
occasioned much talk about him, and at least his name is familiar,
and the fact that he was a great poet. It is interesting to discover
that he was also a critic of Elizabethan poetry. We are thus led to
an important modern critic and poet as a result of having struck from
a side path into a history of Elizabethan literature. Mr. Minto’s
conjecture that Chapman was the “rival poet” of Shakespeare’s sonnets
is valuable because it will take us to those sonnets, and will give us
our first taste of the great hodge-podge of conjectures and ingenious
guesses which constitute a large part of the “study of literature” and
are so delightful and stimulating to lose oneself in. After you have
read Shakespeare’s sonnets and a biography of Shakespeare and the whole
of Mr. Saintsbury’s book, you can pick out some other Elizabethan poet
and conjecture that _he_ is the rival to whom Shakespeare enigmatically
alludes. Neither you nor anyone else will ever be sure who has guessed
right. But that matters little. The value of the game, whatever
its foolish aspects, is that interest in a problem of literature
or literary biography cultivates your mind, keeps you reading, so
entangles you in books and the things relating to books that, like
Mr. Kipling’s hero, you can’t drop it if you tried. The rewards of
such an interest are lifelong and satisfying, even if the solution is
unattainable or not really worth attaining. The literary problem is a
changeful wind that keeps one forever sailing the sea of books.

The rest of Mr. Saintsbury’s remarks, those about English character,
have this significance for us: One cannot read books, or study literary
problems, without studying the people who produced them. The study of
literature is the study of national characteristics. The reason we
Americans know so much more about the English than the English know
about us, is that we have been brought up on English literature, while
the Englishman has only begun to read our literature. Mr. Saintsbury’s
reflections on the Philistinism of the English open at once to the
reader large questions, philosophic in their nature, but not too
philosophic for any ordinary person to think about, the question of
the relation of English literature to Continental literature, and the
question whether the English, who have produced the greatest of all
modern poetry, are in comparison with their neighbors a notably poetic
race. One of the best works on English literature for the student to
read and possess, that by the Frenchman Taine (the English translation
is excellent), is based on a philosophic inquiry into the nature of
the English people. There is, so far as I know, no analogous study
of American literature, though Professor Barrett Wendell’s “Literary
History of America” might have developed into such a book if the author
had taken pains to think out some of his clever, fugitive suggestions.
The best books on the literature of our country which I have seen
are Professor Charles F. Richardson’s “American Literature” and the
“Manual,” edited by Mr. Theodore Stanton for the German Tauchnitz
edition of British and American authors, and published in this country
by the Putnams.

Well, we have entered the classroom in which Mr. Saintsbury is
discoursing of Elizabethan literature, we have entered, so to speak,
by the side door. If our nature is at all shaped to receive profit and
enjoyment from the study of books, we shall be curious to see from
reading the whole of Mr. Saintsbury’s book what has led up to Chapman
and what writers succeed him. Of the various ways in which authors
may be grouped for analysis the historical is the best for the young
student; and it is on the historical scheme of division that most
studies of literature are based. A very useful series of books has been
begun under the editorship of Professor William A. Neilson in which
each volume deals with a class of literature, one with the essay, one
with the drama, one with ballads, and so on. This series, intended for
advanced students, will probably not be the best for the beginner,
though it is often true that works intended for advanced readers are
the very best for the young, and that books for young readers entirely
fail as introductions to more thorough studies. The reader who is
really interested in tracing out the relations between writers will
in good time wish to read studies of literature made on the historic
plan and also some which survey generic divisions of literature.
The two methods intersect at right angles. The main thoroughfare of
literary study which runs from the early story-tellers through Fielding
and Thackeray to Hardy and George Meredith, crosses the other great
thoroughfares: the one which follows the relations between Fielding,
Gray, Johnson, and Burke and other great men of that age; the one
which makes its way through the age of Wordsworth and passes from
Burns’s cottage to Scott’s Abbottsford; and the one through the age of
Victoria. This has been surveyed as far as George Meredith, and the
critics are busily putting up the fences and the sign posts.

In view of the limitations which mere time imposes on the number of
books which any individual may study, we shall resolve early not to
attempt the impossible, not to try to study with great intimacy the
entire range of literature. The thing to do is to select, or to allow
our natural drift of mind to select for us, one period of literature,
or one group, or one writer in a period. In ten years of leisurely but
thoughtful reading, after the day’s work is done, one can know, so
far as one’s given capacity will admit, as much about Shakespeare as
any Shakespeare scholar, that is, as much that is essential and worth
knowing. Not that ten years will exhaust Shakespeare or any other
great poet, but they will suffice for the laying of a foundation of
knowledge complete and adequate for the individual reader, and on that
foundation the individual can build his personal knowledge of the poet,
a structure in which the materials furnished by other students become
of decreasing importance.

There is a story of a French scholar who made up his mind to write a
great book on Shakespeare. In preparation he resolved to read all that
had been written about the poet. He found that the accumulation of
books on Shakespeare in the Paris libraries was a quarry which he could
not excavate in a lifetime, and more appalling still, contemporary
scholars and critics were producing books faster than he could read
them. This story should console and instruct us. We cannot read all
that has been written about Shakespeare; neither can the professional
Shakespearians. But we can all read enough. Two or three books a year
for ten years will, I am sure, put any student in possession of the
best thought of the world on Shakespeare or any other writer. The
multitude of works are repetitious, one volume repeats the best of
a hundred others, and most of them are waste matter, even for the
specialist who vainly strives to digest them.

The thing for us to learn early is not to be appalled by the miles of
shelves full of books, but to regard them in a cheerful spirit, to
look at them as an interminable supply of spiritual food and drink,
a comforting abundance that shall not tempt us to be gourmands. I
am convinced that young people are often deterred from the study of
books by professional students who preside over the long shelves in
the twilight of libraries--blinking high priests of literature who
seem to say: “Ah! young seeker of knowledge, here is the mystery of
mysteries, where only a few of us after long and blinding study are
qualified to dwell. For five and forty years I have been studying
Shakespeare--whisper the name in reverence, not for him, but for
me--and I have found that in the ‘Winter’s Tale’ a certain comma has
been misplaced by preceding high priests, and the line should read
thus and so.” Well, if you go inside and open a few windows to let the
light and air in, you are likely to find, sitting in one of the airiest
recesses, an acquaintance of yours, quite an ordinary person, who has
read the “Winter’s Tale” for only five years, has not bothered his head
about that blessed comma, can tell you things about the play that the
high priest would not find out in a million years, and is using the
high priest’s latest disquisition for a paper weight.

So approach your Shakespeare, if he be the poet you select for special
study in the next ten years, in a light-hearted and confident spirit.
He _is_ a mystery, but he is not past finding out, and the elements of
mystery that baffle, that deserve respect, are those which he chose to
wrap about himself and his work. The mysteries which others have hung
about him are moth-eaten hangings or modern slazy draperies that tear
at a vigorous touch. If you hear learned literary muttering behind the
arras and plunge your sword through, you will kill, not the king, but a
commentator Polonius.

Anyone in the leisure of his evenings, or of his days, if he is
fortunate enough to have unoccupied sunlit hours, may master any poet
in the language to which we have been born. Nothing is necessary to
this study but a literate, intelligent mind, the text of the poet and
such books as one can get in the libraries or with one’s pin money.
And in selecting the books one has only to begin at random and follow
the lead of the books themselves. Any text of “Macbeth” will give
references to all the critical works that anyone needs and they in turn
will point to all the rest. You do not need a laboratory course in
philology in order to read your poet and to know him, to know him at
least as well as the philologist knows him, to know him better, if you
have a spark of poetic imagination. There is no democracy so natural,
so real, and so increasingly populous as the democracy of studious
readers. We acknowledge divinity in man, in our poet above all, and we
see flickerings of divinity in the rare reader who is a critic. But we
do not acknowledge the divine right of Shakespearian scholars or of any
other self-constituted authorities in books. In our literary state the
scholars are not our masters but our servants. We rejoice that they are
at work and now and again turn up for us a useful piece of knowledge.
But they cannot monopolize knowledge of the poets. That is open to any
of us, and it is attainable with far less labor than the scholars have
led us to believe.

The selection of a single writer for special study, a selection open to
us all, should not be made in haste. It should be a “natural selection”
determined gradually and unawares. It will not do to say: “I will now
begin to study Shakespeare for ten years.” That New Year’s resolution
will not survive the first of February. But as you browse among books
you may find yourself especially drawn to some one of the poets or
prose writers. Follow your master when you find him.

In the meantime you can get a general idea of the development of
English literature and the place of the chief writers. A good method
is to read selections from English prose and poetry grouped in
historical sequence. The volumes of prose edited by Henry Craik
and Ward’s “English Poets” afford an adequate survey of British
literature. Carpenter’s “American Prose” and Stedman’s “American
Anthology” constitute an excellent introduction to the branch of
English literature produced on this side of the water. The volumes
of selections may be accompanied by the historical handbooks already
mentioned, which deal with literary periods, or by one of the histories
which cover all the centuries of English authors, such as Saintsbury’s
“Short History,” or Stopford Brooke’s “English Literature.” The student
should guard against spending too large a portion of his time reading
about literature instead of reading the literature itself. But a
systematic review of the history of a national literature has great
value, apart from the enjoyment of literature; it is, if nothing more,
a course in history and biography. I have found that the study of a
handbook of a foreign literature in which I could not hope to read
extensively was in effect a study of the development of the foreign
nation. I never read a better history of Rome than J. W. Mackail’s
“Latin Literature.” The student who can read French will receive
pleasure and profit from Petit de Julleville’s “Littérature Française”
or from the shorter “Petit Histoire” of M. Delphine Duval.

Everyone will study literature in his own way, keep the attitude which
his own nature determines, and for that matter the nature of the
individual will determine whether he shall study literature at all. I
would make one last suggestion to the eager student: Let your study be
diligent and as serious as may be, but do not let it be solemn. I once
attended a lecture on literature given to a mixed audience, that is,
an audience composed mainly of ladies. The lecture was not bad in its
way; it contained a good deal of useful information, but at times it
reminded me of the discourses on “terewth” by Mr. Chadband in “Bleak
House.” It was the audience that was oppressive. The ladies were not,
so far as I could see, entertained, but they had paid their money
for a dose of light, literature and culture and they meant to have
it. So they sat with looks of solemn determination devotedly taking
in every word. Two ladies near me were not solemn; they concealed
their restiveness and maintained a respectful but not quite attentive
demeanor. As I followed them out, I heard one of them say, “Would not
Falstaff have roared to hear himself talked about that way”? I once
heard a class rebuked for laughing aloud at something funny in Chaucer.
The classroom was a serious place and the professor was working.
But Chaucer did not intend to be serious at that moment. On another
occasion the professor remarked that it was well that Chaucer had not
subjected his genius to the deadening effect of the universities of
his time, and it occurred to me then that he would have fared about as
well in a medieval university as his poems were faring in a modern one.
Of course we take literature seriously; by a kind of paradox we take
humorous literature seriously. But solemnity is seldom in place when
one is reading or studying books. The hours of hard work and deliberate
application which are necessary to a study of literature should be
joyous hours, and the only appropriate solemnity is that directly
inspired by the poets and prose writers when they are solemn.


LIST OF WORKS ON LITERATURE

_Supplementary to Chapter XII_

Below are given the titles of a few books helpful to the student of
literature and literary history.


 HIRAM CORSON. _Aims of Literary Study._


 FREDERIC HARRISON. _Choice of Books and Other Literary Pieces._


 GEORGE EDWARD B. SAINTSBURY. _A Short History of English Literature._


 STOPFORD AUGUSTUS BROOKE. _English Literature._


 WILLIAM MINTO. _Manual of English Prose Literature._


 WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY AND ROBERT MORSS LOVETT. _History of English
 Literature._

Remarkable among books for schools on account of its excellent literary
style.


 HIPPOLYTE ADOLPHE TAINE. _History of English Literature._

Philosophical criticism for advanced readers.


 STOPFORD AUGUSTUS BROOKE. _Early English Literature._


 GEORGE EDWARD B. SAINTSBURY. _Elizabethan Literature._


 JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS. _Shakespeare’s Predecessors in the English
 Drama._


 GEORGE G. GREENWOOD. _The Shakespeare Problem Restated._

This work gives a trustworthy appraisal of many modern works on
Shakespeare. (See page 166 of this Guide.)


 JOHN CHURTON COLLINS. _Studies in Shakespeare._


 EDMUND WILLIAM GOSSE. _Jacobean Poets._ _From Shakespeare to Pope._ _A
 History of Eighteenth Century Literature._


 FRANCIS B. GUMMERE. _Handbook of Poetics._


 THOMAS SECCOMBE. _The Age of Johnson._


 WALTER BAGEHOT. _Literary Studies._


 CHARLES FRANCIS RICHARDSON. _American Literature._

In one volume, in the popular edition.


 THEODORE STANTON (and others). _Manual of American Literature._


 EDWARD DOWDEN. _History of French Literature._


 FERDINAND BRUNETIÈRE. _Manual of the History of French Literature._

In the English translation.


 DELPHINE DUVAL. _Petite Histoire de la Littérature Française._

In Heath’s _Modern Language Series_.


 PETIT DE JULLEVILLE. _Littérature Française._

Both the foregoing works are in easy French.


 RENÉ DOUMIC. _Contemporary French Novelists._

In the English translation.


 HENRY JAMES. _French Poets and Novelists._


 KUNO FRANCKE. _History of German Literature._


 GILBERT MURRAY. _History of Ancient Greek Literature._


 JOHN PENTLAND MAHAFFY. _History of Classical Greek Literature._


 JOHN WILLIAM MACKAIL. _Latin Literature._




CHAPTER XIII

SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY


If there is one central idea which it is hoped a young reader might
find in the foregoing pages, it is this: that literature is for
everyone, young or old, who has the capacity to enjoy it, that no
special fitness is required but the gift of a little imagination,
that no particular training can prepare us for the reading of books
except the very act of reading. For literature is addressed to the
imagination; that is, a work which touches the imagination becomes
Literature as distinguished from all other printed things. By virtue
of its imagination it becomes permanent, it remains intelligible
to the human being of every race and age, the only conditions of
intelligibility being that the reader shall be literate and that the
book shall be in the language in which the reader has been brought up
or in a foreign tongue which he has learned to read. We have insisted
on a kind of liberty, equality, and union in the world of writers
and readers, and have, perhaps needlessly, made a declaration of
independence against all scholars, philosophers, and theorists who try
to put obstacles in our way and arrogate to themselves exclusive rights
and privileges, special understandings of the world’s literature.
We believe that literature is intended for everybody and that it is
addressed to everybody by the creative mind of art. We believe that
all readers are equal in the presence of a book or work of art, but
we hastily qualify this, as we must qualify the political doctrine of
equality. No two men are really equal, no two persons will get the
same pleasure and benefit from any book. But the inequalities are
natural and not artificial. Of a thousand persons of all ages who read
the “Iliad,” the hundred who get the most out of it will include men,
women, and children, some who have “higher” education and some who
have not, well-informed men and uninformed boys. The hundred will be
those who have the most imagination. The boy of fourteen who has an
active intelligence can understand Shakespeare better than the least
imaginative of those who have taken the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
in English at our universities. The man of imagination, even if he has
taken the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, will find deeper delight
and wisdom in Shakespeare than the uninformed boy. Readers differ
in individual capacities and in the extent of their experience in
intellectual matters. But class differences, especially school-made
differences, are swept away by the power of literature, which abhors
inessential distinctions and goes direct to the human intelligence.

The direct appeal of literature to the human intelligence and human
emotions is what we mean by our principle of union. Nothing can divorce
us from the poet if we have a spark of poetry in us. The contact of
mind between poet and reader is immediate, and is effected without any
go-between, any intercessor or critical negotiator.

Now, what happens to the principles of our declaration of independence
and the constitution of our democracy of readers when we open to a
page of one of Darwin’s works on biology, or a page of the philosopher
Plato, and find that we do not get the sense of it at all? We can
understand the “Iliad,” the “Book of Job,” “Macbeth,” “Faust”;
they mean _something_ to us, even if we do not receive their whole
import. But here, in two great thinkers who have influenced the whole
intellectual world, Plato and Darwin, we come upon pages that to us
mean absolutely nothing. The works of Plato and Darwin are certainly
literature. But they are something else besides: they are science, and
the understanding of them depends on a knowledge of the science that
went before the particular pages that are so meaningless to us. Here
is a kind of literature, the mere reading of which requires special
training.

We may call this the Literature of Information as distinguished from
the Literature of Imagination. The distinction is not sharp; a book
leans to one side or the other of the line, but it does not fall clear
of the line. A work of imagination, a poem, a novel, or an essay, may
contain abundant information, may be loaded with facts; on the other
hand, the greatest of those who have discovered and expounded facts,
Darwin, Gibbon, Huxley, have had literary power and imagination. But
most great works of imagination deal with universal experiences, they
treat human nature and common humanity’s thought and feelings about the
world. As Hazlitt says, nature and feeling are the same in all periods.
So the common man understands the “Iliad,” and the story of Joseph and
his brothers, and “The Scarlet Letter” and “Silas Marner.”

In Macaulay’s “Essay on Milton” is a very misleading piece of
philosophizing on the “progress of poesy.” It is a pity, when there
are so many better essays--Macaulay wrote twenty better ones--that
this should be selected for reading in the schools as part of the
requirements for college entrance. Macaulay sees that the “Iliad” is as
great a poem as the world has known. He also sees that science in his
own time is progressing by leaps and bounds, that, in his own vigorous
words, “any intelligent man may now, by resolutely applying himself
for a few years to mathematics, learn more than the great Newton knew
after half a century of study and meditation.” He accordingly reasons,
or rather makes the long jump, that whereas science progresses,
poetry declines with the advance of civilization, and the wonder is
that Milton should have written so great a poem in a “civilized” age.
Macaulay was young when he wrote the essay; he seldom muddled ideas
as badly as that. Poetry, if we view the history of the world in
five-century periods, neither advances nor declines. It fluctuates from
century to century, but it keeps a general permanent level. Now and
again appears a new poet to add to the number of poems, but poetry
does _not_ change. Neither does the individual poem. The “Iliad”
is precisely what it was two thousand years ago, and two thousand
years from now it will be neither diminished nor augmented. Creative
art, dealing with universal ideas and feelings and needing only a
well-developed language to work in, can produce a masterpiece in any
one of forty countries any time the genius is born capable of doing
the work. This statement is too simple to exhaust a large subject. The
point is that once man has reached a certain point of culture, has
come to have a language and a religion and a national tradition, more
civilization or less, more science or less, neither helps nor hinders
his art. The arrival of a great poet can be counted on every two or
three centuries. It is because poetry and other forms of imaginative
literature are independent of time and progress that the reader’s
ability to understand them is independent of time and progress. Our
boys can understand the “Iliad.” Fetch a Greek boy back from ancient
Athens and give us his Greek tongue and we can interest him in Milton’s
story of Satan in half a day. But it will take a year or two to make
him understand an elementary schoolbook about electricity. The great
ideas about human nature and human feelings and about the visible
world and the gods men dream of and believe in, these are the stuff of
Imaginative Literature; they have been expressed over and over again
in all ages and are intelligible to a Chinaman or an Englishman of
the year one thousand or the year two thousand. That is why we are
all citizens in the democracy of readers. That is why we do not need
special knowledge to read “Hamlet,” why the most direct preparation for
the reading of “Hamlet” is the reading of “Macbeth” and “Lear.”

Now, all special subjects, biology, geology, zoölogy, political
economy, are continually being forced by the imaginative power of great
writers into the realm of Imaginative Literature. Poetry is full of
philosophy. Our novels are shot through and through with problems of
economics. Great expositors like Huxley and Mill are working over and
interpreting the discoveries of science, relating them to our common
life and making, not their minute facts but their bearing, clear to the
ordinary man. So that there is a great deal of science and philosophy
within the reach of the untrained reader. And a wide general reading
prepares any person, by giving him a multitude of hints and stray bits
of information, to make his way through a technical volume devoted to
one special subject. The moral talks of Socrates to Athenian youths
lead one on, as Socrates seems to have intended to lead those boys
on, into the uttermost fields of philosophy. The genial essayists,
Stevenson, Lamb, Emerson, are all tinged with philosophy and science,
at least the social and political sciences. And when an idle reader
approaches a new subject, economics, chemistry, or philosophy, he often
finds with delight that he has been reading about it all his life. He
is like the man in Molière’s comedy who was surprised to find that he
had always been speaking prose.

Yet there remains a good deal of the Literature of Information which
can be understood only after a gradual approach to it through other
works. You must learn the elements of chemistry before you can
understand the arguments of the modern men of science about radium.
You must read some elementary discussions of economics before you can
take part in the arguments about protection and free trade, socialism,
banking, and currency.

At this point the Guide to Reading parts company with you and leaves
you in the hands of the economists, the historians, the chemists, the
philosophers. Special teachers and advisers will conduct you into those
subjects. They are organized subjects. The paths to them are steep but
well graded and paved. If you wander upon these paths without guidance
you will not harm yourself, and, if you do not try to discuss what you
do not understand, you will not harm anyone else. The list of works in
philosophy and science which I append includes some that I, an errant
reader, have stumbled into with pleasure and profit. I do not know
surely whether any one of them is the best in its subject or whether
it is the proper work to read first. I only know in general that a
civilized man should for his own pleasure and enlightenment set his
wits against a hard technical book once in a while for the sake of the
exercise, and that although for purposes of wisdom and happiness the
Literature of the Ages contains all that is necessary, everybody ought
to go a little way into some special subject that lies less in the
realm of literature than in the realm of science.


LIST OF WORKS IN SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY

_Supplementary to Chapter XIII_

In this list are a few volumes of scientific and philosophic works,
notable for their literary excellence, or for their clearness to the
general reader, or for the historical and human importance of the
author. There is no attempt at order or system except the alphabetical
sequence of authors. Some philosophic and scientific works will be
found in the list of essays, on page 192.


 GRANT ALLEN. _The Story of the Plants._

In _Appleton’s Library of Useful Stories_.


 MARCUS AURELIUS ANTONINUS. _Thoughts or Meditations._

In _Everyman’s Library_ and many cheap editions.


 JOHN LUBBOCK (Lord Avebury). _The Beauties of Nature and the Wonders
 of the World We Live In._ _The Use of Life._

A popular writer on scientific and philosophic subjects.


 LIBERTY HYDE BAILEY. _First Lessons with Plants._ _Garden Making._


 ROBERT STAWELL BALL. _The Earth’s Beginning._ _Star-Land: Being Talks
 with Young People._


 JOHN BURROUGHS. _Birds and Bees and Other Studies in Nature._
 _Squirrels and Other Fur Bearers._

These books are especially suitable for young readers.


 CHARLES TRIPLER CHILD. _The How and Why of Electricity._

For the uninformed reader.


 JAMES DWIGHT DANA. _The Geological Story Briefly Told._


 CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN. _On the Origin of Species._ _What Mr. Darwin
 Saw in His Voyage Round the World in the Ship “Beagle.”_

The second of the two books named is especially for young readers.
The book from which it is taken, Darwin’s “Journal” of the voyage is
in _Everyman’s Library_. For expositions of Darwin’s theories, see
Huxley’s “Darwiniana,” Wallace’s “Darwinism” and David Starr Jordan’s
“Footnotes to Evolution.”


 GOLDSWORTHY LOWES DICKINSON. _The Greek View of Life._ _A Modern
 Symposium._


 ROBERT KENNEDY DUNCAN. _The New Knowledge._

A popular exposition of theories of matter that have developed since
the discovery of radioactivity. Intelligible to any (intelligent)
high-school pupil.


 EPICTETUS. _Discourses._

The English translation in _Bohn’s Library_.


 FRANCIS GALTON. _Natural Inheritance._ _Inquiries into Human Faculty._

The second volume is in _Everyman’s Library_.


 ARCHIBALD GEIKIE. _Class-Book of Geology._


 HENRY GEORGE. _Our Land and Land Policy._ _The Science of Political
 Economy._


 ASA GRAY. _Manual of the Botany of the Northern United States._


 ARTHUR TWINING HADLEY. _The Education of the American Citizen._


 HERMANN LUDWIG FERDINAND VON HELMHOLTZ. _Popular Lectures on
 Scientific Subjects._

In the English translation by Edmund Atkinson with Helmholtz’s
“Autobiography” and an introduction by Tyndall.


 KARL HILTY. _Happiness: Essays on the Meaning of Life._

Translated by Francis Greenwood Peabody.


 WILLIAM TEMPLE HORNADAY. _The American Natural History._


 CHARLES DE FOREST HOXIE. _How the People Rule; Civics for Boys and
 Girls._


 THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY. _Darwiniana._ _Evolution and Ethics._ _Man’s
 Place in Nature._

Huxley is the greatest man of letters among modern English men of
science. A volume of his essays is in _Everyman’s Library_.


 ERNEST INGERSOLL. _Book of the Ocean._

Especially for young people.


 HAROLD JACOBY. _Practical Talks by an Astronomer._


 WILLIAM JAMES. _The Principles of Psychology._ _The Will to Believe._


 HERBERT KEIGHTLY JOB. _Among the Water-Fowl._


 DAVID STARR JORDAN. _True Tales of Birds and Beasts._

Especially for young readers.


 WILLIAM THOMSON (Lord Kelvin). _Popular Lectures and Addresses._


 HENRY DEMAREST LLOYD. _Wealth Against Commonwealth._

An important work on modern economic and business problems.


 JOHN STUART MILL. _On Liberty._ _Principles of Political Economy._


 JOHN MORLEY. _On Compromise._


 HUGO MÜNSTERBERG. _Psychology and Life._ _On the Witness Stand._


 FREDERIC WILLIAM HENRY MYERS. _Science and a Future Life._


 SIMON NEWCOMB. _Astronomy for Everybody._


 GEORGE HERBERT PALMER. _The Field of Ethics._ _The Nature of Goodness._


 WALTER HORATIO PATER. _Plato and Platonism._


 FRIEDRICH PAULSEN. _Introduction to Philosophy._

The excellent English translation affords within easy compass a view
of philosophy equal to several elementary courses in philosophy at a
university. It may be begun by any young man or woman of, say, eighteen.


 PLATO. _Dialogues._

The “Republic” is in _Everyman’s Library_ and in other cheap editions.
Several of the dialogues are to be found under the title, “Trial and
Death of Socrates” in the _Golden Treasury Series_. See also Walter
Pater’s “Plato and Platonism.” The great Plato in English is Jowett’s.


 JACOB AUGUST RIIS. _The Battle with the Slum._ _How the Other Half
 Lives._ _The Children of the Poor._

Among the most sensible, sympathetic and human of modern works on
sociology.


 JOSIAH ROYCE. _The Spirit of Modern Philosophy._ _Studies of Good and
 Evil._ _The World and the Individual._

“The Spirit of Modern Philosophy” is a beautifully written introduction
to the study of philosophy.


 GEORGE SANTAYANA. _The Sense of Beauty._ _Poetry and Religion._


 GARRETT PUTNAM SERVISS. _Astronomy with an Opera Glass._


 NATHANIEL SOUTHGATE SHALER. _Aspects of the Earth._ _The Individual: A
 Study of Life and Death._ _Nature and Man in America._


 DALLAS LORE SHARP. _A Watcher in the Woods._ _Wild Life Near Home._


 HENRY SIDGWICK. _The Elements of Politics._ _The Methods of Ethics._


 HERBERT SPENCER. _First Principles._ _The Principles of Ethics._ _The
 Principles of Sociology._


 SILVANUS PHILLIPS THOMPSON. _Elementary Lessons in Electricity and
 Magnetism._


 RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH. _On the Study of Words._

Contains all the philology that anyone needs.


 JOHN TYNDALL. _Fragments of Science._ _New Fragments._ _Essays on the
 Imagination in Science._ _Glaciers of the Alps and Mountaineering in
 1861._

The last volume is in _Everyman’s Library_, with an introduction by
Lord Avebury.


 ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE. _Man’s Place in the Universe._ _The Malay
 Archipelago._ _Australia and New Zealand._


 GILBERT WHITE. _Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne._

In _Everyman’s Library_.


 WILHELM WINDELBAND. _History of Ancient Philosophy._


 WALTER AUGUSTUS WYCKOFF. _The Workers: An Experiment in Reality._

The story of a professor of economics and sociology who became a
laborer. Interesting as a story and a good popular introduction to the
problems of labor and wages.


THE END

       *       *       *       *       *




Transcriber’s note


Minor punctuation errors have been changed without notice. Hyphenation,
italics, and spelling of personal names were standardized.

The following changes were made:

  Page 104: “Make my thy lyre”           “Make me thy lyre”
  Page 179: “Homor, who, according”      “Homer, who, according”
  Page 196: “Dr. Quincey’s beautiful”    “De Quincey’s beautiful”
  Page 215: “have “Eugenie Grandet””     “have “Eugénie Grandet””




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